Comments on: Things That Shouldn’t Be in File Names for $1,000 Alex

By: Brent Crouch

Brent Crouch — Fri, 09 May 2008 05:02:27 +0000

I just realized when loading files on the internet that most search engines don’t understand the underscore in a file name. They don’t see it as a seperator they view it as a character. If you want to use a seperator for internet files use a hyphen.

By: Mike Golvach

Mike Golvach — Fri, 09 May 2008 04:52:11 +0000

Another nice way, in linux or unix, to find and get rid of files with problem characters is to run “ps -i” to note the “inode number of the file. Then (making sure you’re in the directory you want to delete the file name from, since inode numbers aren’t unique across partition) running something like:

find . -inum 5678 -exec rm {} \;

It almost always works, but I almost always use it a last resort, also :)

Nice post!

, Mike

By: Branch Conditionally :: Be mindful of your environment

Branch Conditionally :: Be mindful of your environment — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 18:25:11 +0000

[...] For instance, file names can be an issue if code exists in different places. File systems in Unix use the slash (”/”) and Windows file systems use (””). Therefore, I would never use either character in a filename if I am writing code that with exist on multiple machines (more). [...]

By: Linux Jockey

Linux Jockey — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 15:59:45 +0000

Just try cleaning your hidden files with ‘rm -rf .*’ and you might have a reason to think before you glob.

By: Besco

Besco — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 12:23:18 +0000

I’d include a period as the first character in a filename to be a bad idea as well .. on a Mac that indicates an invisible file .. and what a pain it is trying to work with THAT kind of file ..

By: Secret Whisperer

Secret Whisperer — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 10:54:57 +0000

And the files starting with a period in unix, representing hidden files! That bugs me a lot.

But a nice list there…got to agree with you with most of everything on it…

By: Planeta FreeBSD » Things That Shouldn’t Be in File Names for $1,000 Alex

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 16:51:18 +0000

[...] Original post by Joseph [...]

By: Gregory Brown

Gregory Brown — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 14:17:39 +0000

Full ACK. Thanks for writing this.

By: Doug L.

Doug L. — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 19:33:16 +0000

Good list. A few points:

You can also say “rm ./-x” to remove a file whose name starts with a hyphen.

Mac OS X is among the Unix systems which now support case-preserving filenames.

IMHO, allowing spaces in filenames is definitely not an improvement. For *me*, as an end-user, they’re a pain in the butt whenever I want to write a small shell script to move, copy, or otherwise process some subset of files, and for which no GUI tools exist.

By: anon

anon — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 17:21:40 +0000

And you can use \ to escape a space, it still doesnt mean its any less of a pain in the ass. At least the shell will tab complete the escaped file name normally, where as one has to remember to stop option processing.