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Re: Posible to create filenames with colons?


At 08:58 AM 6/23/2003 -0700, Michael Eager wrote:

There are a few packages (Perl for example) which create file names
with colons.  Windows doesn't like this.

Perl creates no such files, thus Windows does not complain.


It would be good if Cygwin mapped these into something compatible,
say, an equal sign.

It would be a disaster. It's much better to accept the limitations of the underlying filesystem (and fix broken applications, if there are any) than to try and create the illusion that FAT supports characters it doesn't. The current strategy is easier to implement, cleaner, less confusing to the user, and therefore easier to support.


And there are problems with colon in particular. It has special meaning in a Windows path. It is used to delimit unix-style PATHs. Finally, "verylong:filename" has a specific meaning on NTFS that is not what you might expect.

Please read the archives (as suggested in this thread) and understand the issues involved before posting suggestions.

Jeremy




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