Re: Case Insensitive File Systems -- Torvalds Hates Them

Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> 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.

Torvalds did not "allow newlines".  Unix filesystems, long before Linux
ever existed, have only disallowed two characters in filenames:

ASCII null (because C strings are ASCII null terminated)

The forward slash (/) (because forward slash is used as the directory
separator).

Torvalds was simply following standard Unix protocol (in order to be
compatible with Unix standards) for what was "allowed" to be in a
filename.