Kernel Hacks & Weird Filenames

[Paul Gillingwater]

In article <972 at cresswell.quintus.UUCP> ok at quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
>In article <24 at csnz.nz>, paul at csnz.nz (Paul Gillingwater) writes:
>> Does that mean that a naive user can make a file with a <SPACE>
>> in the name?   e.g.   "John Doe" or "Job Cost" or other equally
>> "intuitively correct" but WRONG names...:-)
>
>Yes you can make such file names (I often do), and what's wrong with them?

OK guys, flame taken!  I have known since 1979 that *nix has had the
ability to store nearly any characters in file names, and I think it's
a good idea - depending upon the shell you're using.  Most of us out
here are _not_ using windows yet, and must live with [sh,csh,ksh].

The wrongness comes in how the shell treats requests from naive users
who don't know about quoted strings or the fact that John Doe is quite
different from john doe.  What I'd like to see is a more forgiving,
or perhaps a 'cleverer' filename parser, that can decide that John Doe
(without quotes) is similar to john doe (in .) - and ask the user to confirm
(unless they're running in a script) that that's what they meant - 
"Do what I mean, not what I say...".  SCO Xenix seems to go some of
the way towards this, but not enough - and the place for it is in
the SHELL, not the kernel.

-- 
Paul Gillingwater, Senior Consultant   Call my private BBS - Magic Tower,
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