Kernel Hacks & Weird Filenames

[Ian Dall]

"Unprintable" characters in file names would be less of a problem if they
could be readilly be seen. It seems to me that the best solution is to
allow file names to be as general as possible but to modify either the
terminal driver or ls to display unprintable characters in some unambiguous
form.

If done in the terminal driver, new stty options could be added to say
what characters are to be considered unprintable. This could break
some things which like to setup terminals by using "cat foo" where foo
is a file full of special characters but this already has potential
problems if foo has ^M, ^J or ^I in it (perhaps we need a r(aw)cat).
Yes I know the terminal stuff is already a mess but at least this
concentrates the mess in one place :-). This scheme handles European,
Japanese or whatever character sets fairly well.

I think modifying ls to display filenames with unprintable character
sets is a bit less tidy. Perhaps it could pick up a printable character
set from an environment variable. One certainly wouldn't want umpteen new
options to specify which character set your terminal can print.

-- 
 Ian Dall           "In any argument there will be people on your
                     side who you wish were on the other side."
idall at augean.oz