Re: (emacs+unix): How to have a file-name containing slashes, angle-brackets, etc?

[David Hansen]

On Sun, 24 Aug 2008 12:12:38 -0700 (PDT) Xah wrote:

> On Aug 24, 5:31 am, Nikolaj Schumacher <m...@nschum.de> wrote:
>> Xah<xah...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Unix is the worst, they pretty much just allow
>> > alphanumerics and not even space. If you have anything like “,=();
>> > \'"~&-” etc, you can expect most shell tools to erase you disk)
>>
>> Actually unix systems allow pretty much every character except / and the
>> null character.
>
> To say that unix allows much wider chars in file names is like saying
> mud is the best medium for sculpture.
>
> Unix file names, for much of its history up to perhaps mid 2000s,
> effectively just allows alphanumerics plus hyphen “-” and underscore
> “_”. As a contrast for comparison, Mac's file names often contain
> punctuations such as “,$#!*()” and space, but also allows non-ascii
> such as

In the early days of napster (around 2000) I downloaded an Asian pop
song with a beep (^G) in the filename.  That was on GNU/Linux.  Yes,
when I typed `ls' the xterm beeped.

I think at least the Linux kernel never gave a f*** about the characters
as long as it was no '/' or \0.  Though it wasn't that easy to rename
the files in this directory.

David