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

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Tue, 01 Mar 2011 10:08:14 -0500, Lars T. Kyllingstad  
<public at kyllingen.nospamnet> wrote:

> On Tue, 01 Mar 2011 09:52:50 -0500, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 01 Mar 2011 09:31:18 -0500, Lars T. Kyllingstad
>> <public at kyllingen.nospamnet> wrote:
>>
>>> On Tue, 01 Mar 2011 08:50:29 -0500, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>>
>>>> "Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy at yahoo.com> wrote in message
>>
>>>>> 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.
>>>> 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.
>>
>> You still have to worry about them, because the shell treats them
>> specially.
>>
>> If there is a file named '*.d', and you type in rm *.d on the command
>> line, guess what happens?
>
> If you are using a command line shell you ought to know better than
> typing "rm *.d". :)  If you are using a GUI shell, you right-click and
> select "Delete file", and nothing bad happens.

"should have known better" is an unsatisfying response to "I just  
*accidentally* deleted all my work."  You could tell that to someone who  
drives off a cliff, but isn't it also good to put up guard rails?

very very smart, experienced people sometimes do things without thinking.   
If we can do something really small to prevent catastrophic errors, I  
think it's worth it.  I think in close to 100% of cases, one never wants a  
file with \ or * in it, so the library disallowing it will not cause any  
issues.

One time, I was unpacking a program that wanted to be unpacked in /, so it  
could put files in bin, lib, etc.  I accidentally unpacked it in the  
current directory.  Wanting to remove it and go to / in order to unpack, I  
typed rm -rf /.  Bad things happened :)  This is obviously not an example  
that could have been prevented, but it goes to show that sometimes we just  
type commands without thinking, and the less chance we have to make  
mistakes, the better.

-Steve