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

[David Kastrup]

Xah <xahlee@gmail.com> writes:

> 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
> “_”.

You are making this up, period.  The earliest Unix systems, like from
the end of the seventies when a file name could just contain 14
characters, allowed all characters except slash and the null character.

> Sure, you can use many non-alphanumeric chars besides hyphen and
> underscore in unix, but the system is simply not designed for it.

Nonsense.

> Majority of unix tools, including file name listing, will chock and
> break if your filename contain these chars.

Nonsense.  If you use a file listing command without explicitly telling
it to escape control characters (and the file listing commands have
flags for doing so, while the default is for having the output verbatim,
for convenient use in pipelines), files with control characters in them
will mess up the terminal.

But you have not even been talking about control characters, just
printable characters.  And there you are just plainly wrong.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum