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 References: <20250428080014.0000347f@gmail.com> <20250428111242.00007426@gmail.com> <6813f997@news.ausics.net> User-Agent: tin/2.0.1-20111224 ("Achenvoir") (UNIX) (Linux/2.4.31 (i586)) NNTP-Posting-Host: news.ausics.net Date: 6 May 2025 09:10:57 +1000 Organization: Ausics - https://newsgroups.ausics.net Lines: 31 X-Complaints: abuse@ausics.net Path: ...!news.misty.com!weretis.net!feeder9.news.weretis.net!news.bbs.nz!news.ausics.net!not-for-mail Bytes: 2449 Rich wrote: > Computer Nerd Kev 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. -- __ __ #_ < |\| |< _#