Re: Case Insensitive File Systems -- Torvalds Hates Them

not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) writes:

Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote:

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.

Yes and no - he could have made a system that behaved differently to
most (all?) of the Unix platforms of the day in any number of ways, but
the consequence would be reduced adoption. We might be talking about
this in comp.os.freebsd.misc instead.

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.

I suspect the filename restrictions would make FAT as a rootfs
challenging.

--
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/