std.path.getName(): Screwy by design?

[Daniel Gibson]

Am 01.03.2011 15:31, schrieb Lars T. Kyllingstad:
> On Tue, 01 Mar 2011 08:50:29 -0500, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>
>> "Steven Schveighoffer"<schveiguy at yahoo.com>  wrote in message
>> news:op.vrn2pooteav7ka at steve-laptop...
>>> On Tue, 01 Mar 2011 08:13:33 -0500, Lars T. Kyllingstad
>>> <public at kyllingen.nospamnet>  wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Tue, 01 Mar 2011 08:02:44 -0500, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On Tue, 01 Mar 2011 04:16:36 -0500, Jonathan M Davis
>>>>> <jmdavisProg at gmx.com>  wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> I can understand if the path stuff
>>>>>> can't deal with / or \ in file names (that's probably not worth
>>>>>> trying to get to
>>>>>> work right), but it _should_ be able to handle directories with dots
>>>>>> in them and
>>>>>> files with no extension.
>>>>>
>>>>> / and \ are not legal in names on any filesystem that I know of.
>>>>>
>>>>> -Steve
>>>>
>>>> On a *NIX machine, try
>>>>
>>>>    touch "c:\\foo\\bar"
>>>>
>>>> You may be surprised. ;)
>>>
>>> bleh... that seems useless :)  I purposely checked FAT before posting,
>>> because I was sure Unix disallowed backslashes, I wanted to make sure
>>> FAT didn't allow slashes.
>>>
>>> Holy crap, something that DOS got right and Unix didn't!
>>
>> Windows also handles files/paths with spaces a hell of a lot better than
>> Unix. This, despite the fact that Unix technically allowed them long
>> before Windows did. (I don't mean this as OS-bashing.)
>
> I really don't understand what you guys are talking about.  If you
> encounter a filename with spaces, just enclose it in quotes or escape the
> spaces.  If you encounter a filename with characters like *, \, etc, just
> escape them or enclose the filename in single quotes.
>
> And you only have to do the above when using a command-line shell.  I
> just tried renaming a file to "c:\foo bar\*.baz" using the GNOME file
> manager and it worked perfectly, just like any other name.
>
>
>>>  From this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filename, it appears that
>>> really, the only disallowed character in unix filenames is '/'.  Even
>>> '*' is allowed as a filename.  How... horrible.
>
> Yeah, the only illegal filename characters are '/' and null.
>
>
>> I would actually feel very good to just simply not support such things.
>> If some unix user is going to use such awful filenames they can just
>> deal with the consequences. (And I'm *rarely* the kind of person to hold
>> such a viewpoint on software development matters.)
>
> If you have a bunch of "reserved characters", that means more special
> cases to worry about in code.  I say it's better to allow as many
> characters as possible.
>
> -Lars

There are some fun special cases in Windows (originating in DOS):
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247%28v=vs.85%29.aspx#naming_conventions 
(reserved device names).
I think even CON.txt etc (a reserved name with an extension) is illegal.

Cheers,
- Daniel