Re: Case Insensitive File Systems -- Torvalds Hates Them

Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> wrote:

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?

For one thing it makes shell scripting complicated, and for another
this is just really confusing:

$ touch file1 file2$'\n'file3 file4
$ ls -1
file1
file2
file3
file4

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?

Actually I do avoid most of the characters forbidden in Windows
too, I think. Newlines are the only ASCII characters that I'd take
offence at other people using in shared filenames though.

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