Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!munnari!otc!metro!basser!natmlab!dmsadel!augean!idall From: idall@augean.OZ (Ian Dall) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: Kernel Hacks & Weird Filenames Message-ID: <326@augean.OZ> Date: 9 May 88 03:04:27 GMT References: <13041@brl-adm.ARPA> <14020039@hpisod2.HP.COM> Reply-To: idall@augean.OZ (Ian Dall) Organization: Engineering Faculty, University of Adelaide, Australia Lines: 24 "Unprintable" characters in file names would be less of a problem if they could be readilly be seen. It seems to me that the best solution is to allow file names to be as general as possible but to modify either the terminal driver or ls to display unprintable characters in some unambiguous form. If done in the terminal driver, new stty options could be added to say what characters are to be considered unprintable. This could break some things which like to setup terminals by using "cat foo" where foo is a file full of special characters but this already has potential problems if foo has ^M, ^J or ^I in it (perhaps we need a r(aw)cat). Yes I know the terminal stuff is already a mess but at least this concentrates the mess in one place :-). This scheme handles European, Japanese or whatever character sets fairly well. I think modifying ls to display filenames with unprintable character sets is a bit less tidy. Perhaps it could pick up a printable character set from an environment variable. One certainly wouldn't want umpteen new options to specify which character set your terminal can print. -- Ian Dall "In any argument there will be people on your side who you wish were on the other side." idall@augean.oz