Re: Handling special characters (\/:*?"<>|) gracefully

[Igor Peshansky <pechtcha at cs dot nyu dot edu>]

On Tue, 23 May 2006, Hicks,Mike wrote:

> There are a number of special characters that cannot be used in
> filenames on the NTFS filesystem, this includes backslash (\), slash
> (/), colon (:), asterisk (*), question mark (?), double-quote ("),
> less- and greater-than (<>), and pipe (|).  In contrast, most Unix
> systems only prevent the use of slash characters in filenames
> themselves, since that is used as the separator between levels in
> directory hierarchy.
>
> I like to listen to music while at work, where I run Windows with
> Cygwin.  I periodically like to use 'scp' (secure copy, from the SSH
> suite) to download music from my home computer, where I run Linux.
> Some of my music files at home have special characters in them (in
> particular, colon, question mark, and double-quote have appeared most
> frequently).  When I attempt to use scp to download a file with one of
> these characters in the name, it appears that an open() or write()
> function fails with the error "No such file or directory."
>
> Is there a way to get scp to convert the filename to something that can
> be written to disk?  For example, either removing the characters from
> the filename or converting them to underscores would work fine for me.
> A system-wide option would be great, perhaps controlled by an
> environment variable or two.  Otherwise, each program that can write
> files from foreign sources would have to be rewritten.  It would also
> be an improvement to see a more descriptive error than "No such file or
> directory", though I suppose developers would be hesitant to expand
> upon the standard list of error types.
>
> As a workaround, I find it is easiest to create a zip file on my home
> system with the files I want to transfer, then simply unzip it on my
> work machine.  Cygwin's 'unzip' utility appears to handle this
> situation correctly and will convert unusable characters to
> underscores.  I've tried doing the same thing with a tar file, but
> 'tar' exhibits the same problems as 'scp' and will not write files that
> originally had a special character in the name.
>
> Apologies if there's already a good method for handling this situation
> (other than renaming my original files, thanks).  I did a requisite
> Google search and some thumbing through man pages, but didn't come
> across anything (though that doesn't mean there wasn't anything
> there...).

You're in luck: "PAGER='less +/managed' man mount".
Once you have the files on a managed mount, you might also want to look
into using the "cygstart" utility.
	Igor
-- 
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