On Mon, 05 Nov 2012 14:47:47 -0500, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
>> Don't most OSes allow non-printing characters in filenames? VMS and
>> Unix always have. AFAIK, there are only two characters that can't
>> appear in a Unix filename: '\x00' and '/'.
>
> But can you /enter/ them with common keystrokes on a plain text
> terminal (it's been 35 years, so I don't recall the exact key used for
> the BEL on CP/V -- my mind thinks <ctrl-f> was used)... No cut&paste
> from "character map", no <alt>-3digitsequence...
For most people, that's a pointless restriction. You might as well insist
that the file name can be typed without using the shift key, or using
only the left hand of the keyboard. Copy-paste, char map, alt-digits are
as much a part of the input environment on modern systems as the keyboard.
Nevertheless, I do tend to prefer underscores to spaces, simply because I
often use naive tools that treat spaces as separators. That is, command
line shells.
For what it's worth, you can enter any control character in Unix/Linux
systems with readline in bash using the C-q key combination. Newline
needs a bit of special treatment: you need to wrap the name in single
quotes to stop the newline from being interpreted as the end of the
command.
[steve@ando temp]$ touch 'foo
bar'
To enter the newline, I typed Ctrl-Q to tell bash to treat the next
character as a literal, and then typed Ctrl-J to get a newline.
[steve@ando temp]$ ls
foo?bar
[steve@ando temp]$ python -c "import os
> for nm in os.listdir('.'): print repr(nm)"
'foo\nbar'
--
Steven
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