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Date:      Wed, 5 Feb 2003 19:18:13 -0600
From:      Mike Meyer <mwm-dated-1044926294.fb46ab@mired.org>
To:        Walter <walterk1@earthlink.net>
Cc:        Questions <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org>
Subject:   Re: handling non-printable characters in file names
Message-ID:  <15937.47061.743702.496178@guru.mired.org>
In-Reply-To: <3E41A24E.9090607@earthlink.net>
References:  <3E41A24E.9090607@earthlink.net>

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In <3E41A24E.9090607@earthlink.net>, Walter <walterk1@earthlink.net> ty=
ped:
> There's probably someone who can explain why non-
> printable characters are useful in file names, but
> I'd really rather disallow them altogether - if
> there's a build option or control flag to set.
> Anyone?

BSD is character-set neutral. Well, it tries. The only two characters
that are magic in file names are 0x2f and 0x00, because they both
terminate the file name. Other than that, you are free to use whatever
character encoding you want to. That's why characters that may be
unprintable in some encodings are allowed in file names.  What shows
up in the locale en_US.ISO8859-1 as "Resum=E9" will show up with an
unprintable last character if you haven't set the LANG environment
variable.

The only way to change this behavior is to change the kernel source to
support it.  Expect resistance from every developer in a country that
doesn't use the English alphabet if you try and get that change put
into the tree.

=09<mike
--=20
Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org>=09=09http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more inform=
ation.

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