Making safe file names

[Neil Hodgson]

Andrew Berg:

> This is not a Unicode issue since (modern) file systems will happily accept it. The issue is that certain characters (which are ASCII) are
> not allowed on some file systems:
>   \ / : * ? "<  >  | @ and the NUL character
> The first 9 are not allowed on NTFS, the @ is not allowed on ext3cow, and NUL and / are not allowed on pretty much any file system. Locale
> settings and encodings aside, these 11 characters will need to be escaped.

    There's also the Windows device name hole. There may be trouble with 
artists named 'COM4', 'CLOCK$', 'Con', or similar.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/74496
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nul_%28band%29

    Neil