Re: [Monotone-devel] Bug? I suspect a filename "?" is not being ignored by mtn.

[Zack Weinberg]

On 6/26/07, Welland, Matthew R <address@hidden> wrote:
> I am importing some legacy stuff and it has a directory "?" which is
> breaking monotone. Admittedly "?" is a very bad name for a directory but
> monotone could handle it a little more gracefully.

You are correct that monotone could handle this more gracefully.
However, are you certain that the directory is named "?"? That name
should be unobjectionable.  I suspect what you really have is a
directory whose name is a single control character.   ls will report
such a directory as being named "?" unless you use -b, and thanks to
shell globs, under many conditions you can use "?" as its name.  A
demo:

$ mkdir $(printf '\003')  # the name of this dir is the byte with value 003
$ ls -la
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  3 zack zack   60 2007-06-26 17:43 .
drwxrwxrwt 11 root root 1160 2007-06-26 17:46 ..
drwxr-xr-x  2 zack zack   40 2007-06-26 17:43 ?
$ ls -lab
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  3 zack zack   60 2007-06-26 17:43 .
drwxrwxrwt 11 root root 1160 2007-06-26 17:46 ..
drwxr-xr-x  2 zack zack   40 2007-06-26 17:43 \003
$  touch $(printf '\003/foo')
$ ls -la ?
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 zack zack 60 2007-06-26 17:48 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 zack zack 60 2007-06-26 17:43 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 zack zack  0 2007-06-26 17:48 foo

I regret to say that monotone deliberately does not support such
directories; we will improve the error message if you tell us what
command gave the above error, but we're not going to make it work.

> mtn: wrote debugging log to
> /tmp/mrwellan/rcs2mtn/com.intel.an.central_inputs/_MTN/debug
> mtn: if reporting a bug, please include this file

This file would be helpful.

zw