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Characters and filenames
Authored by: miggins on Feb 05, '03 08:03:05PM

Mac filenames can have any character except : (colon) which is the path seperator. Unix filenames can have any character except / (slash) which is the path seperator. Windows plays it a bit safer - you can't have any of these \\ / : * ? " < > | in a filename.

In Mac OS X, if you use HFS+ the seperator is : but from unix programs (like Terminal) it will be auto translated to / for those programs.

This is all good, but I wish that the smb mounting feature in Mac OS X would translate or strip out the characters that Windows doesn't like when you copy files. What happens now is you drag a folder to a Windows drive and it just gets part way through and says "something could not be found" and stops. Very annoying.

Actually it would be best if you could choose a connection mode when you mount an smb drive - 1. store everything, which would use ._ files and encode filenames somehow so that they look strange in Windows but keep the special characters in Mac OS X.
2. compatible mode, which would strip resource fork and metadata from the file and strip special characters from the filename.



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