Steve Ward wrote: > (This is slightly off topic, and a late reply) > > I'm curious who's responsible for deciding the standards of filenames. Is > it kernel people, fs people, a standards group, or other?
At this point it is defined by legacy behavior. Legacy behavior has caused this to be codified into the present system standards. After thirty years it is hard to make compatibility breaking changes. But in the early 1970's the present filesystem semantics were created by if I recall correctly Ken Thompson at AT&T Bell Labs when Unix was written. At that time it was decided to allow any character except for the zero byte null character which would terminate the string and the '/' which would separate directory components. All other characters were allowed. This has continued through all of the many filesystem rewrites by others to the present day. > And are there benefits of allowing control characters in filenames? The rules are very simple. Control characters and others are not specifically differentiated. There are benefits to having a very simple naming. Personally I would have disallowed whitespace. It would have made so many things since then quite a bit simpler. :-) Bob _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
