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The tale of aux.c

heirloom.sourceforge.net

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Re: The tale of aux.c

#21

Post by cesarb »

russellbeattie wrote: post #18
tyingq wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A legacy requirement to not ever have any files with a basename of CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, or LPT9 doesn't make sense either :)

I was wondering what the full list was. Thanks!

It's more complicated than that, that's just the list of forbidden base names, but there is also a list of forbidden characters, and many other rules. This MSDN article has all the details: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...

Re: The tale of aux.c

#22

Post by lambda »

uyoakaoma wrote: post #3
pcwalton wrote: post #2

We ran into this issue in Servo too. https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/1226

Me as well while cloning linux on windows

You run into different, but similar, issues cloning Linux on macOS as well, since HFS+ is case-insensitive by default (and looks like the same is true of APFS), but the Linux source has filenames that differ only in case (don't ask me why).

Re: The tale of aux.c

#23

Post by Iv »

monochromatic wrote: post #5

> But my answer is: No, I will not deface the mailx source code in order to make life easier for customers of a vendor of non-Unix systems who chose to clutter his directory name space with useless entries. I will especially not do so as this vendor has threatened free software on several occasions. > The Heirloom Project is oriented at the Unix tradition, and it is free. If you want to use mailx, there is the techni…

From 2007. Back when Microsoft really was at war with OSS and called Linux a cancer.

Re: The tale of aux.c

#24

Post by condescendence »

>But nowadays, people confuse Microsoft Windows, the successor to DOS, with a Unix operating system, and want to run mailx on it.

...huh

>If you want to use mailx, there is the technically and morally sane option of using a free Unix implementation.

I mean it's really not that hard to release a Windows compatible version. You change a single file name?

This just sounds like throwing gas on the flame war that is unix vs windows.

Re: The tale of aux.c

#25

Post by tedunangst »

spullara wrote: post #15

In 1991 I was working at a place with a Novell Netware network. I decided to make a system that would execute remote commands by writing them to a shared directory and other machines would see the files and execute the commands. I named those files COMXXXXX.TXT where the X's were a random number (yeah, that was a bad idea). Every few days the system would hang and stop working. I finally narrowed it down to the rando…

Lesson: always zero pad.

Re: The tale of aux.c

#27

Post by tedunangst »

JosephRedfern wrote: post #19

What happens if you create a file called aux.c under a different OS, and then mount the drive on Windows?

Nothing. Maybe. The magic happens in open() or createfile() (or a little underneath there, precisely). Nothing about the disk format prohibits such names, and they're accessible via other pathnames. But if you have a program that lists files and then tries to open each one automatically, it may have a bad time. I would hope AV software has tested this scenario, but AV software.

Re: The tale of aux.c

#28

Post by tedunangst »

Iv wrote: post #23
monochromatic wrote: post #5

> But my answer is: No, I will not deface the mailx source code in order to make life easier for customers of a vendor of non-Unix systems who chose to clutter his directory name space with useless entries. I will especially not do so as this vendor has threatened free software on several occasions. > The Heirloom Project is oriented at the Unix tradition, and it is free. If you want to use mailx, there is the techni…

From 2007. Back when Microsoft really was at war with OSS and called Linux a cancer.

Cancer was 2001 actually.

Re: The tale of aux.c

#29

Post by chungy »

condescendence wrote: post #24

>But nowadays, people confuse Microsoft Windows, the successor to DOS, with a Unix operating system, and want to run mailx on it. ...huh >If you want to use mailx, there is the technically and morally sane option of using a free Unix implementation. I mean it's really not that hard to release a Windows compatible version. You change a single file name? This just sounds like throwing gas on the flame war that is unix…

You can even work around it without renaming the file. Cygwin and LXSS for example allow the use of file names such as "aux.c" without any changes to the mailx source.
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