OT: DOS/Windows and slashes (was Re: Windows XP Pro and PossiblefilePro Bug)

[Bill Vermillion]

On Sun, Dec 05 10:37 , Kenneth Brody, showing utter disregard for 
spell-checkers gave us this: 

> Fairlight wrote:
> [...]
> > > My finger slipped off the 'v' key onto the adjacent 'c' key and
> > > I type   ci <filename> when I wanted to type  vi <filename>.
> > > But that's how we learn isn't it?  Have you ever done that one?

> > Yeah, I've buggered something into CVS that way. Funnily, I
> > was trying to type CVS just now and -three- times in a row
> > typed VCS instead before I could force it to go right. :)

> What about typing "print" and having an "f" magically appear after it?

That's the old 'finger training' coming into play.  It's why
musician practice things over and over because after a while it
become almost an autonomic response and the fingers know what to
expect next so you don't think about them.  The human machine
needs more debugging at times, but on the whole it works pretty
well :-)

> [...]

> > > Or things which come in from a Mac world where a / is
> > > permitted in a file name. I have enough problems with
> > > <spaces> when things get moved cross-platform.

> > I just tried escaping one in *nix and no joy.  (touch bli\/p)  You can
> > escape damned near everything else, including control characters.  Not
> > slashes.

> You can escape the slash all you want. All that happens is that
> you end up with a slash, which is built into the kernel as the
> path separator. It's not possible to get a filename with a '/'
> or '\0' in it. (Well, you could theoretically place a '/' in
> a filename with a raw disk editor, but I have no idea if you
> could ever access it.)

I've had to rename files like that to make them accessible.

AIR if the file is  bad/name  I rename if with something
like   mv ./ba*me goodname.   The names I get with slashes in
them have come from Mac systems.   

I used to see some strange things when I was the Usenet node
gateway into the local Apple BBS system back in the late 1980s.

I was out of town one time and the Apple guy convinced my son to
reboot the machine as he could not connect.  [The MS reboot
syndrome also affects the Apple group].   That did not fix it
as there was a problem in the file itself.

And he got my son to remove that file so I never got to see the
problem.  I suspect it was a file with a sequence purposely set
in it to trigger the TIES escape codes used be modem vendors
who did not wish to pay royalties to Hayes for using the AT
command set - which like MS buying QDOS to make PC-DOS, Hayes
bought - and I think it was from Concord - the original inventory.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com