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BoulderDash · Jun 12, 2003, 10:31 PM

Hey there,
Are there any characters which are still off-limits in File and Folder names, such as:

!, @, #, $, %, /, etc.

Thanks!
BD

Coxy · Jun 12, 2003, 10:47 PM

Still?!? Still?!?

The *only* character you shouldn't [can't] put in a folder/file name is ':', and always has been.

This causes all sorts of problems with remote drives with inferior filesystems mounted locally.

Stupidly, the above does not apply to GODDAMN PROJECT BUILDER PROJECTS.

BoulderDash · Jun 12, 2003, 11:28 PM

Hey Commander,
I appreciate the Reply and all, but pages like these always give me pause:

http://www.esi.ac.at/info/computersystem/dos-unix.html

http://www.lehigh.edu/helpdesk/faq/qa/unixchar.html

http://cmgm.stanford.edu/classes/unix/filenames.html

So, does Apple have some sort of official guideline with OS X, or anything?

Thanks again,
BD

jayg · Jun 13, 2003, 01:10 AM

If you don't use a command line shell, then the only character you can't use is ':'. This isn't something you need to worry about; if you try to use that character, the Finder or save file dialog won't let you.

Even if you do use the command line, there really aren't any more restrictions. It's just harder to type name with special characters since they might be interpreted as meaning something else. Those pages are recommending you don't name a file something like "~file" since the shell will see this as "/Users/yournamefile", but you could still use the file by escaping the special char like in "vi \~file".

It's kind of funny that Apple went out of their way to preserve the ':' character as the only restricted character, since it's the old path seperator. The path seperator is really '/' and that's what can't be in file names. If you look at it in the Terminal, you can see that files with '/' in the name in the Finder really have the ':' in their names.

Uncle Skeleton · Jun 13, 2003, 02:09 AM

I used a / in a folder name in Mail once and it totally screwed things up

chris v · Jun 13, 2003, 09:04 AM

a period at the beginning of a file name will make it invisible in the Finder. I didn't know this when i switched to X, and had been using a period in OS 9 to keep my ".files" folder sorted to the top. Imagine my chagrin when I booted X for the first time only to have my files all dissapear. I figured it our pretty quickly when I booted back into 9 and noticed all the invisible folders on my X partition.

CV

Evan · Jun 13, 2003, 09:52 AM

BoulderDash,

Here's another link for your collection:

http://www.macobserver.com/tips/maco...20020531.shtml

BoulderDash · Jun 13, 2003, 10:25 AM

Hey,
That's a great link. As simplistic as it is, I just really want to know if it's okay to leave Files and Folders like these - as is:

Jan & Dean
Three Dollar Bill Yall$
Rainy Day Women #12 & 35.mp3
Slam!.mp3
Who Can It Be Now?.mp3
Let There Be Eve...
Intro/Ramble On.mp3

Thanks,
BD

* P.S. Though yes, I see that ":" cannot be used at all thanks to the Finder.

midwinter · Jun 13, 2003, 02:13 PM

yup

Xeo · Jun 13, 2003, 06:15 PM

Originally posted by BoulderDash:
Hey,
That's a great link. As simplistic as it is, I just really want to know if it's okay to leave Files and Folders like these - as is:

Jan & Dean
Three Dollar Bill Yall$
Rainy Day Women #12 & 35.mp3
Slam!.mp3
Who Can It Be Now?.mp3
Let There Be Eve...
Intro/Ramble On.mp3

Thanks,
BD

* P.S. Though yes, I see that ":" cannot be used at all thanks to the Finder.

If you use the Finder to name them, or they are already named that, there are no problems with it.

Michel Fortin · Jun 13, 2003, 10:08 PM

Mac OS Classic always used : as the folder separator in path. Unix always used /. To accomodate Carbon applications that were ported from OS 9, Apple did this:

Carbon applications use : as the path separator and UNIX (and Cocoa) applications use /. This was to ensure some sort of compatibility. Now what happen if you have a / in you filename and you look at it from a UNIX application? Guess what! It will be shown as a :. Try file listing in terminal to see it. It symply swaps any / in filename for a :.

That does not mean that Cocoa UI does not compensate for this as it does in many places (thanks to the display name mechanism), but the real file path it is working with use / as a folder delimiter.

So you can't really use : and at some place / may be swapped for :. Take a note of it. Otherwise, there is no limitation to filename characters.

BoulderDash · Jun 15, 2003, 08:11 AM

Thanks for the help guys... any chance that any of the Folder and File names mentioned above (with @, &, *, ., etc. characters) would cause anything to not be readable if transferred over to Windows 98 or Windows XP? Or if burned onto a CD?

BD

Uncle Skeleton · Jun 15, 2003, 11:13 AM

I found once that Windows couldn't read from a cd a folder with "quotes" in the name. Or maybe it was that it started with a ". I forget what version of Windows as well. Probably 98

midwinter · Jun 15, 2003, 12:32 PM

Originally posted by BoulderDash:
Thanks for the help guys... any chance that any of the Folder and File names mentioned above (with @, &, *, ., etc. characters) would cause anything to not be readable if transferred over to Windows 98 or Windows XP? Or if burned onto a CD?

BD

Windows will not see files with an em dash in them.

edit: hrm. And apparently neither will macnn!

nerd · Jun 15, 2003, 03:11 PM

Copying to a windows server will will choke on most of the characters. The SMB client doesn't like them at all. See this link.

The part that gets me is when you copy from the Mac drive to a Windows or Linux box over SMB there isn't one complaint about characters. If the Samba client on Linux can do it why not the Mac?

I found all this out the hard way trying to use a Linux box for a file server at home. I have 7 drives that I want to set up in RAID 5 but I ended up moving the drives to a G3 and mirroring 2 of them because the finder is too picky about different characters.

Brad