Making safe file names

[Dave Angel]

On 05/07/2013 09:28 PM, Neil Hodgson wrote:
> 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.
>

In MSDOS 2, there was a switch that would tell the OS to ignore such 
names unless they were prefixed by \DEV.  But like the switchar switch, 
it was largely ignored by the ignorant, and probably doesn't exist in 
current versions of M$OS

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

While we're looking for trouble, there's also case insensitivity. 
Unclear if the user cares, but tom and TOM are the same file in most 
configurations of NT.

-- 
DaveA