Re: (emacs+unix): How to have a file-name containing slashes, angle-brackets, etc?

[Phil Carmody]

David Hansen <david.hansen@gmx.net> writes:
> On Sun, 24 Aug 2008 12:12:38 -0700 (PDT) Xah wrote:
>
>> On Aug 24, 5:31 am, Nikolaj Schumacher <m...@nschum.de> wrote:
>>> Xah<xah...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> > Unix is the worst, they pretty much just allow
>>> > alphanumerics and not even space. If you have anything like “,=();
>>> > \'"~&-” etc, you can expect most shell tools to erase you disk)
>>>
>>> Actually unix systems allow pretty much every character except / and the
>>> null character.
>>
>> To say that unix allows much wider chars in file names is like saying
>> mud is the best medium for sculpture.
>>
>> Unix file names, for much of its history up to perhaps mid 2000s,
>> effectively just allows alphanumerics plus hyphen “-” and underscore
>> “_”. 

I have to burst in here and simply state that I think that's
possibly the single least correct statement I've seen on 
this newsgroup ever.

>>As a contrast for comparison, Mac's file names often contain
>> punctuations such as “,$#!*()” and space, but also allows non-ascii
>> such as
>
> In the early days of napster (around 2000) I downloaded an Asian pop
> song with a beep (^G) in the filename.  That was on GNU/Linux.  Yes,
> when I typed `ls' the xterm beeped.

Most linux setups I've seen have had ls sanitise its output 
and filter out control characters. To examine what was filtered,
you could use ls -b to have them escaped instead.

> I think at least the Linux kernel never gave a f*** about the characters
> as long as it was no '/' or \0.  Though it wasn't that easy to rename
> the files in this directory.

You think right. Xah perhaps doesn't know the difference
between an OS and a shell?

If in doubt, simply prefix filenames with './'. That declaws
practically everything.

Phil
-- 
The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the 
point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. 
The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Preface to Androcles and the Lion