[Mailman-Users] List Name Guidelines

[mailman at tux.org]

On Thu, 26 Sep 2002, Raquel Rice wrote:

> On Thu, 26 Sep 2002 13:16:28 -0400
> "Dave Warchol" <Warchol at harthosp.org> wrote:
>
> > In testing, I ran into some issues using a special
> > character (apostrophe) in the list name, this was in
> > an earlier post.  Any guidelines to follow when
> > specifying the list name?
>
> Pretty much, a legal filename in *nix.  (alphabetic characters,
> numeric characters, underscore "_" and, dash "-")

Alphanumerics, underscore and dash is a great suggestion, and is
what I use myself, but "a legal filename in *nix" is not such a
great suggestion.  At least in the *nixes that I have dealt with
(Solaris, HPUX, and Linux), filenames can contain fun things like
space, tab, "!", "@", "$", "&", "*", parenthesis, braces, bracket,
angle-brackets, "|", control characters ... lots of stuff.  (Those
who doubt it, please see below for a small sample.)  Some of these
are even legal in e-mail addresses, but "alphanumerics, underscore
and dash" are certainly the most common and least controversial
characters for e-mail addresses and the other places Mailman list
names show up.

- Andrew

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actual ls output:

$ ls -l a*
-rw-r--r--   1 ajw01s   staff          4 Sep 26 14:37 a b
-rw-r--r--   1 ajw01s   staff          4 Sep 26 14:37 a!b
-rw-r--r--   1 ajw01s   staff          4 Sep 26 14:38 a"b
-rw-r--r--   1 ajw01s   staff          4 Sep 26 14:39 a$b
-rw-r--r--   1 ajw01s   staff          4 Sep 26 14:39 a&b
-rw-r--r--   1 ajw01s   staff          4 Sep 26 14:38 a'b
-rw-r--r--   1 ajw01s   staff          4 Sep 26 14:37 a*b
-rw-r--r--   1 ajw01s   staff          4 Sep 26 14:38 a<b
-rw-r--r--   1 ajw01s   staff          4 Sep 26 14:37 a at b
-rw-r--r--   1 ajw01s   staff          4 Sep 26 14:38 a]b
-rw-r--r--   1 ajw01s   staff          4 Sep 26 14:37 a`b
-rw-r--r--   1 ajw01s   staff          4 Sep 26 14:38 a{b
-rw-r--r--   1 ajw01s   staff          4 Sep 26 14:40 a|b