[Python-Dev] PEP 383: Non-decodable Bytes in System Character Interfaces

[R. David Murray]

On Mon, 27 Apr 2009 at 01:40, Glenn Linderman wrote:
> Yes.  My suggested use of ? is a visible character that is illegal in Windows 
> file names, thus causing no valid Windows file names to be visually mangled. 
> It is also a character that should be avoided in POSIX names because:
>
> 1) it is known to be illegal on Windows, and thus non-portable
> 2) it is hard to write globs that match ? without allowing matches of other 
> characters as well
> 3) it must be quoted to specify it on a command line
>
> That said, someone provided a case where it is "easy" to get ? in POSIX file 
> names.  The remaining question is whether that is a reasonable use case, a 
> frequent use case, or a stupid use case; and whether the resulting visible

Reasonable I don't know, but frequent (FSDO frequent) and out of
our control yes.  It happens often when downloading files with wget,
for example.

--David