Message-ID: <68194581@news.ausics.net>
From: not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev)
Subject: Re: Case Insensitive File Systems -- Torvalds Hates Them
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
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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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