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MS Teams channels cannot contain MS-DOS device names

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Re: MS Teams channels cannot contain MS-DOS device names

#61
post #2

Words: forms, CON, CONIN$, CONOUT$, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM1 to COM9, LPT1 to LPT9, desktop.ini, _vti_

In the mid-90s there was a fun and short period of time where IRC clients like mIRC could be set to auto-receive files through DCC.. and would happily write to names like LPT1 (which of course would just write the data directly to the recipient’s printer)

Re: MS Teams channels cannot contain MS-DOS device names

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah those 8+3 file names sure birthed some creative abbreviations. Necessity, mother, all that

Brevity forces thought, which I prefer to "Putting a Sentence in a File Name.docx". FORTRAN originally had the same limitation for function names, and that lead to some classics such as GEMM and SAXPY.

Those two are obviously GetExtendedMemoryMap and Saxophone.

Re: MS Teams channels cannot contain MS-DOS device names

#63

I was about to say "Which is essentially leaking the existence of something terrible inside. They should be embarrassed to say something like this in public. Like saying you can't have %s or $PS1. Why the hell not? What are you doing with this user-supplied input?" But maybe it's more about what everyone else might do with a channel name. Ie they might cut & paste it anywhere, and I guess windows users aren't expecte…

they're SharePoint limits, man. Teams is backed by SharePoint and it's not a secret, nor is it embarrassing.

> nor is it embarrassing

Isn’t it? The folders work fine on a Mac.

Teams is not a things of beauty, and is rough as all hell for daily users.

Re: MS Teams channels cannot contain MS-DOS device names

#64
If I ever do anything where I let people name things it's rarely a good idea to NOT lock it down with some restrictions. "Minimum length", "Maximum lenght" at least, but anyone who has programmed windows machines for any length of time might also have the scars to remember to do "is a valid file name" too.

Having to escape everything or replace names with stable guids is not a good relpacement for storing \whatever\logs\channelname or whatever the need may be. Especially for systems that are hard bound to windows filesystems or Sharepoint to begin with.

I bet there are apps on other OS:es where you CAN name things a "\0" sequence or "/" and for each such app I imagine there are people who regret making that possible.

Re: MS Teams channels cannot contain MS-DOS device names

#65
post #50
post #2

Words: forms, CON, CONIN$, CONOUT$, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM1 to COM9, LPT1 to LPT9, desktop.ini, _vti_

Now I actually wonder were there ever any machines that had LPT9, COM9 I could barely see.

You can reassign real device to any of these names

Re: MS Teams channels cannot contain MS-DOS device names

#69
post #26
post #22

This is such a Microsoft thing to do. DOS compatibility will haunt us for the rest of this century at least.

Sometimes I wish we had fresh clean slate OS. Not the baggage of DOS or Unix... Something modern and sensible without insanity of either system.

I hear GNU Hurd will hit 1.0 any day now[1] :) /s

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37036851

Re: MS Teams channels cannot contain MS-DOS device names

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree BC is a laundable goal and appreciate their efforts. Though I do wish it didn't include limiting passwords to obscenely short lengths or absurd subsets of characters.

Yeah those 8+3 file names sure birthed some creative abbreviations. Necessity, mother, all that

Whenever I create a filename that is long or has spaces, I still pause and worry "okay, what might break if I do this", even though such concerns probably died a couple decades ago.

Actually scripts breaking if files or paths have a space in them seems to be a thorn in the side of dev/ops/it folks that never goes away, does it?

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