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The Lounge What is on Your Mind? Filenames with hyphens - UNIX style? Post 302638811 by methyl on Thursday 10th of May 2012 05:57:37 PM
Old 05-10-2012
@jliiagre
Recommendation to avoid hyphens and space characters in filenames did not come from the Posix "standard". They did however come from a cross-platform portability guides.
I never thought that is would happen but I am seeing more problems with filenames created on unix systems where the user thinks that they are on a Microsoft system:
Code:
"C:\March report - with summary figures"

The C:\ upsets my multi-platform backup software (you can never restore the file), the reverse solidus upsets scripts which process filenames (because it's a Shell special character) and the space-delimited hyphen will break any script which does not take special precautions.

I'd be interested in a further analysis of the Solaris kit filenames for colon characters and hash characters.
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mkmanifest(1)						      General Commands Manual						     mkmanifest(1)

NAME
mkmanifest - mtools utility to create a shell script to restore UNIX file names from DOS SYNOPSIS
mkmanifest [files] OPTIONS
None OPERANDS
A list of UNIX file names to be converted to DOS name format. DESCRIPTION
The mkmanifest command creates a shell script that aids in the restore of UNIX file names that were overwritten by DOS file name restric- tions. DOS file names are uppercase only, cannot exceed 8 character names, 3 character extensions and do not support device names or non- alphanumeric characters. Not all UNIX file names are supported in the DOS world. The mtools commands may have to change UNIX names to fit the DOS file name conven- tions. Most commands provide the verbose option (-v), that displays new file names if they have been changed. The following table shows some examples of file name conversions: ----------------------------------------------- UNIX name DOS name Reason for the change ----------------------------------------------- thisisatest THISISAT file name too long file.stuff FILE.STU extension too long prn.txt XRN.TXT PRN is a device name .abc X.ABC null file name hot+cold HOTXCOLD illegal character ----------------------------------------------- EXIT STATUS
The following exit values are returned: Success. Failure. EXAMPLES
Assume you have the following UNIX files that you want to copy to a DOS diskette using the mcopy command. very_long_name 2.many.dots illegal: good.c prn.dev Capital The mcopy command converts these file names to the following: very_lon 2xmany.dot illegalx good.c xprn.dev capital To restore the previous file names, use the mkmanifest command as follows: mkmanifest very_long_name 2.many.dots illegal: good.c prn.dev Capital > manifest The previous mkmanifest command line produces the following: mv very_lon very_long_name mv 2xmany.dot 2.many.dots mv illegalx illegal: mv xprn.dev prn.dev mv capital Capital The good.c file name did not require conversion, hence it was not included in the output. If these files were copied from diskette to another UNIX system, and you wanted to restore the original names, retain a copy of the mani- fest file (captured output) so that it can be used to convert the file names again. FILES
Executable file SEE ALSO
Commands: mcopy(1), mtools(1) mkmanifest(1)
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