Re: Case Insensitive File Systems -- Torvalds Hates Them

Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote:

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

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.

Perhaps, but since he wasn't using existing UNIX filesystems and
using a custom one instead, it seems to me like he had a choice.
After all you can still use FAT or NTFS on Linux even though they
have more disallowed filename characters. It could have been the
same with ext* forbidding newlines (also tmpfs etc.). Then you'd
only have to worry about handling newlines in the rare case of
reading from some non-Linux filesystems like UFS.

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