Strip incompatible characters from Windows partitions!

[Milosz Derezynski]

But clearly this issue can be seen as a limitation of the FAT filesystem,
just not yet imposed at the highest level of the filesystem driver (kernel
or userland)?

Surely ext3 *would* allow a slash in a filename (i guess?), if the userland
tools would just let the filesystem driver ever receive such a name, even if
it might then break the filesystem since it would create an ambiguity with a
subdirectory. I can't be quite sure about this but i assume that at a
technical level, a slash could be just part of a filename in ext3, XFS or
whatever.

If that's the case, what would be the problem of implementing a restriction
into the VFAT module akin to the restriction in ext3 not allowing to use
slashes in filenames? Whether this restriction is "synthetic" or not would
be IMO up to debate and should find its grounds on whether slashes in ext3
filenames are an artificact of high-level access to the filesystem or not
(as we're dealing with this on Linux here it seems to be a good base for
debate).

Furthermore, does anyone know how OS X and/or other operating systems handle
this issue? Samba not allowing/normalizing such filenames is i think a good
hint that it shouldn't be considered sane to write such filenames to a FAT
directory structure.

2008/5/16, Chris Jones <chris.jones at canonical.com>:
>
> Hi
>
>
> Evan wrote:
> > paths are slashes, while Windows has a considerable list (apostrophes,
> > asterisks, etc).
>
>
> The problem is that it doesn't have a list, there are multiple lists and
> they aren't documented.
> NTFS will reject some filenames, win16/win32/win64/.net/etc. will reject
> others (as you have seen by Linux's ability to create files that Windows
> Explorer refuses to handle).
>
> There is no canonical list of filenames to avoid on Windows.
> See: http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2006/11/03/941420.aspx
>
> That alone makes this (imho) a basically intractable problem,
> unfortunately.
>
> Cheers,
> --
>
> Chris Jones
>
>
> --
> Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list
> Ubuntu-devel-discuss at lists.ubuntu.com
> Modify settings or unsubscribe at:
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/attachments/20080516/16f9c7b8/attachment.html>