4 ms·

> That breaks when you have newlines in filenames, no? That seems like an extremely pathological case.

by pstuart 12y ago

userbinator 12y ago
Pathological or not, ensuring that pathnames can essentially contain any byte value except the 0 terminator, and it will still work, is important to prevent surprising behaviour which often has security implications.
- myhf 12y ago
  too pathological; didn't implement
- typedweb 12y ago
  The only character not allowed in Unix file names is the forward slash directory separator, so even that would be a pathological mistake waiting to bite someone. Edit: my mistake, they can't contain nulls either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8485861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8485861
deathanatos 12y ago
> That seems like an extremely pathological case. When a human is creating files by hand, I almost certainly agree. When a program is creating files, however, it's only a matter of time before weird characters wind their way in there. I really wish newlines had been disallowed. (There's UI implications, in addition to the parsing ones — how do you do a list view with newlines in the filename?; I also wish filenames had a reliable character set and weren't just bytes.)
- mjevans 12y ago
  UI issues; on display format all /printing display elements/ (including spaces as spaces and things that look like whitespace but aren't spaces) with readable glyphs, or those numeric standins for non-rendering glyphs.
- bmn_ 12y ago
  I think dwheeler is trying to get this fixed/standardised in POSIX via the Open group.
  - oblio 12y ago
    That it's going to be an uphill battle is an understatement. Someone replied on LWN, when he posted his proposal, that he had implemented a sort of home-grown database using non-UTF8 characters for the file names. Rube Goldberg, indeed!
- userbinator 12y ago
  how do you do a list view with newlines in the filename? Show them with the standard escape sequence for a newline: This\ filename\ncontains\ a\ newline Same for any other characters that could be considered 'special' in output; I really wish the backslash convention for escaping was more common. Character sets and such are a UI/display issue, so I don't think there should be any special handling for them at the lower levels of the system.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 12y ago
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- oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
  Whilst OSX's file-naming is disgusting (hello, /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables), I don't think I've ever encountered newlines in filenames, and I've used it a fair amount. What are you referring to?

> That breaks when you have newlines in filenames, no? That seems like an extremely pathological case.

by pstuart 12y ago

> That breaks when you have newlines in filenames, no? That seems like an extremely pathological case.

Pathological or not, ensuring that pathnames can essentially contain any byte value except the 0 terminator, and it will still work, is important to prevent surprising behaviour which often has security implications.

myhf 12y ago
too pathological; didn't implement
typedweb 12y ago
The only character not allowed in Unix file names is the forward slash directory separator, so even that would be a pathological mistake waiting to bite someone. Edit: my mistake, they can't contain nulls either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8485861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8485861

deathanatos 12y ago

> That seems like an extremely pathological case. When a human is creating files by hand, I almost certainly agree. When a program is creating files, however, it's only a matter of time before weird characters wind their way in there. I really wish newlines had been disallowed. (There's UI implications, in addition to the parsing ones — how do you do a list view with newlines in the filename?; I also wish filenames had a reliable character set and weren't just bytes.)

mjevans 12y ago
UI issues; on display format all /printing display elements/ (including spaces as spaces and things that look like whitespace but aren't spaces) with readable glyphs, or those numeric standins for non-rendering glyphs.
bmn_ 12y ago
I think dwheeler is trying to get this fixed/standardised in POSIX via the Open group.
- oblio 12y ago
  That it's going to be an uphill battle is an understatement. Someone replied on LWN, when he posted his proposal, that he had implemented a sort of home-grown database using non-UTF8 characters for the file names. Rube Goldberg, indeed!
userbinator 12y ago
how do you do a list view with newlines in the filename? Show them with the standard escape sequence for a newline: This\ filename\ncontains\ a\ newline Same for any other characters that could be considered 'special' in output; I really wish the backslash convention for escaping was more common. Character sets and such are a UI/display issue, so I don't think there should be any special handling for them at the lower levels of the system.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
Whilst OSX's file-naming is disgusting (hello, /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables), I don't think I've ever encountered newlines in filenames, and I've used it a fair amount. What are you referring to?