5 ms·

putting colons in your filenames are almost as weird as alternate data streams.

• cordite 10y ago
  It's not a forward slash or a NUL byte. And it is a printable character. Doesn't seem so wrong to me.
  • tamana 10y ago
    A colon is a forward slash on MacOS
  • stevekemp 10y ago
    Some tools assume particular characters mean things. For example GNU tar will assume if you find ":" in the filename of the archive it's marks a hostname..
    • brobinson 10y ago
      Use --force-local to bypass this issue. I got hit by this recently. :)
  • cygx 10y ago
    It's used as separator in various places on *nix (eg PATH).
    • ygra 10y ago
      So are semicolons on Windows, yet still legal in file names. For PATH you can just quote the ones containing the separator (at least on Windows).
      • cygx 10y ago
        Traditionally, there's no way to quote in PATH on *nix. I do not believe that's changed, so if you cannot just change the name, you'd need to use a workaround like creating a colon-free symlink.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• jey 10y ago
  How do you feel about file extensions longer than three characters? How about filenames with multiple dots in them?
  • Stratoscope 10y ago
    Not sure what the question is here, can you clarify? Long extensions and multiple dots are perfectly valid in Windows filenames. I use them all the time. They're not like colon which has a special meaning referencing alternate streams.
    • soundwave106 10y ago
      The funny thing is that in most Windows tools, it doesn't mean even alternate file streams. It simply is flat out illegal (unless used as a drive letter); most tools will reject any program trying to save a file in the format of "filename:ADS". Even in managed code tools, it's this way. For instance, in C#, a statement like this: File.WriteAllText(@"c:\test.txt:teststream", "AFS test"); Will error with "path format is not supported". There's no way to access ADS natively in .NET. The only way to access ADS is to evoke native Win32 methods.
      • PeCaN 10y ago
        PowerShell can access ADS easily, so presumably there's something in .NET for that. e.g. Get-Content -Path foo -Stream bar
        • ygra 10y ago
          I can't look at PowerShell's assemblies, but they could just call into native code for that.
    • jey 10y ago
      These are things that seem normal to me that a Windows user might also describe as "weird", just like the GP post described colons in filenames.
  • 10y ago
• spdionis 10y ago
  So I can't name my file "Theory of everything: 42.pdf"?