I wonder what's the point to support newlines as a valid character in file names. And, for that matter, any other ASCII characters in the 0x00..0x1f range. 0 i

I wonder what's the point to support newlines as a valid character in file names. And, for that matter, any other ASCII characters in the 0x00..0x1f range. 0 is reserved for the terminator so you can't have a null byte, but I think instead of looking at this from the perspective of "what's the point to support", you should think of it as "why add additional code just for restriction, when we can consider that an upper-layer concern". The same goes for case sensitivity --- it makes the FS code in the kernel more generic and simpler. Contrast this with the other extreme, filesystems that have to effectively implement a subset of Unicode because they're case-insensitive beyond ASCII. Even Apple abandoned that idea over time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13953800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13953800