Re: Case Insensitive File Systems -- Torvalds Hates Them

On 2025-05-01, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:

rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On Thu, 1 May 2025 13:42:36 -0000 (UTC), Borax Man wrote:

But spaces in filenames cause me *far more* headaches.  They are the
greater evil.

 
The real evil was the mishmash of DOS and Windows that wound up with
'Program Files' becoming 'progra~1'.

>
I question the wisdom of Torvalds on this topic since he allowed
ext filesystems to have an even greater evil than either of those:
newlines in file names! Imagine if the average joe were exposed
to that capability - we'd have multi-paragraph file names to deal
with all over the place.

But why should newlines not be allowed in file names? Last I checked
(granted, that was many years ago), there is only one character which
usually needs to be excluded, \0. And then the path element separator is
probably convenient to avoid. Anything else, where and why would you
draw a line? And how would you avoid reaching the Windows situation
where there's a whole group of convenient glyphs that are not allowed?
(Or can that be disabled too in Windows NT?)

--
Nuno Silva