Re: [9fans] spaces in file/dir names? (and acme)?

[rsc@plan9.bell-labs.com]

> Can acme not deal with spaces in file names?

No.  Most of the system doesn't deal well
with spaces in file names.

> When I tried creating files (touch) and directories (mkdir)
> with names containing spaces on kfs and on fake worm fs,
> that was refused with an error message 'bad character in ... name'.

That's because you don't want to do that.  Really.

> However, intro(5) states
>
>     Plan 9 names may contain any printable character (that is, any
>     character outside hexadecimal 00-1F and 80-9F) except slash.)

The Plan 9 kernel is being discussed there.  Other file servers
may impose their own restrictions.  For example, you can't put
a colon in a dossrv file name.

> But /sys/src/fs/port/9p2.c:155 contains
>
>                 if((*p & 0xFF) <= 040)
>                         return Ename;
>
> and /sys/src/fs/port/sub.c and /sys/src/cmd/disk/kfs/^(9p2.c sub.c)
> contain similar checks.

And, at the moment, you can't put spaces in Plan 9 file server
file names.

Everything starts to break when you deal with spaces
in file names.  Ls -q and various other hacks start to
deal with it, but we're not there yet.  I was tempted a few
years ago to replace spaces with ␣ in dossrv's file names.
We couldn't do that then because of the name length
restrictions (␣ is three precious bytes).

Russ