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You can use /
Authored by: wtp on Feb 06, '03 10:38:25AM

Finder's actually displaying a ":".

In the bad old days of non-Unixy MacOS, a colon was used as the `path separator'. Unix has always used the forward slash as it's path separator, and so Mac users saw a change with MacOS X. To hide this change from the users, and confuse them, Finder.app shows files with ":" in their names as files with "/" in their names. If you open Terminal.app, however, ls will show you the true name. If you type "touch foo:bar" on the command line, it will create a file called foo:bar... look at that file in the Finder: "foo/bar".

The old MacOS accepted more characters in its filenames than Windows did, but not as much as Unix does. Unix only forbids the slash and ASCII NULL (it could be argued that the filesystem allows ASCII NULL, but Unix (and C!) really does not). Unix allows newlines, form feeds and other crazy things in its filenames. It is yet to be determined if these extra characters are a Big Mistake or a Bad Idea. In practice, shell wildcards, quotes, and even spaces are a little bit of a pain to use on the command line, and should be discouraged. So now, with OS X, Mac Users have greater flexibility, at the cost of some extra complexity. The choice is ultimately yours as to what you name your files, and how you want to shoot yourself in the foot. Just no "/" -- okay? :-)

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