Unix tends to be ridiculously permissive with allowed characters in file names. On Linux, the only disallowed characters are NUL and the slash, and they are onl

Unix tends to be ridiculously permissive with allowed characters in file names. On Linux, the only disallowed characters are NUL and the slash, and they are only disallowed because they have a special meaning (string terminator and path separator). AFAIK, MacOS X also disallows NUL and slash, but IIRC its GUI silently switches slash (Unix path separator) with colon (which IIRC was the MacOS 9 path separator). So, if you were to migrate to OS X instead of to Windows (and if my knowledge is correct) you'd just have to replace the / with a : and the users wouldn't even notice.