Why exception from os.path.exists()?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Mon, 11 Jun 2018 06:10:26 +1000, Chris Angelico wrote:

> Can you try creating "spam:ham" and "spam/ham"? If they're both legal,
> I'd like to see what their file names are represented as.

The Finder could very easily be substituting another character, like 
Konqueror (the KDE 3 file manager) does. In Konqueror, you can create a 
file named "spam/ham" and it quietly substitutes "spam%2fham" instead. 
But Konqueror's GUI treats it completely transparently: it is displayed 
as a slash, and if you copy the file name from the GUI you get a slash.

I seem to recall Gnome doing something similar, except it quietly 
substitutes U+2044 FRACTION SLASH or U+2215 DIVISION SLASH instead.

To really be sure what is going on, you would have to bypass the Finder 
and any shell and write the file name using the OS X low-level API.

Or create the file using a classic Mac (system 8 or older), where slashes 
definitely are not treated as special. Not the Mac OS classic emulation 
layer.


Hmmm... you know I might just be able to do that. Write a file to a 
floppy, then mount it under Linux. If I had a Linux computer with a 
floppy disk drive.

(The march of technology is sometimes a nuisance.)

By the way, for some reason I don't seem to have received Bev's post.


-- 
Steven D'Aprano
"Ever since I learned about confirmation bias, I've been seeing
it everywhere." -- Jon Ronson