Bash (under Cygwin) problem with colon
Eric Blake
ebb9@byu.net
Fri Mar 23 17:47:00 GMT 2007
Philip Peake <philip <at> vogon.net> writes:
>
> The colon (:) character appears to be being misinterpreted.
That's Windows for you!
>
> As an example:
>
> $ > xxx:yyy
On Windows 9x, that is an invalid file name. On NT class machines, that is a
command to create an alternate stream (google this list for prior discussion on
the matter). In short, : is not a valid Windows filename character, because
Windows treats it as a trigger for special-casing. It is not bash's fault:
bash is not handling it as a comment, but is just passing the string "xxx:yyy"
unchanged through to Windows' file handling routines. A managed mount might
help you out in this case, but in general, filenames designed to be portable to
multiple systems MUST NOT contain a colon.
--
Eric Blake
volunteer cygwin bash maintainer
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