Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion

File Names : what should be avoided

<< < (4/6) > >>

Armando:
I'm generally very conservative with file naming -Renegade (June 10, 2007, 06:44 PM)
--- End quote ---

What are your motivations for that ?


but I do have some folders that will only exist on my own disk like, "日本 시장조사 - blah blah - 2007-06-11" which make sense to humans.
--- End quote ---

I like it.  :)

Doesn't it strike anyone as completely insane that here the tail is really wagging the dog? I mean that we're serving the computer and not the other way around?
--- End quote ---

Yes. And yes again?   :D

gjehle:
some guidelines:
yes i would avoid using periods except to separate a file extension, as you will confuse programs that treat anything
-mouser (June 09, 2007, 05:15 PM)
--- End quote ---

every windows program i used (except for some crappy 8+3 16bit stuff back in the days
was able to handle multiple periods just perfectly fine
/([^\.]+)$/ FTW

and while i'm a friend of the "strict US ascii", "no spaces", "all lower case" i have recently switched to unicode/utf8 for all filesystem related stuff
it's kinda nice to be able to browse folders like this without problems:

Armando:
I use national chars (the Danish æøåÆØÅ), spaces, multiple periods, etc. Applications not supporting this really need to be updated, and their lazy authors should receive a good spanking. -f0dder (June 10, 2007, 06:55 PM)
--- End quote ---

I am part of your club as I got into the habit of using all the frenchy chars (éÉèÈêÊëËçÇàÀûÛùÙ) when I moved from windows 3.1 to Windows 95...


I used to think that case-sensitiveness was good in a filesystem (ie., what *U*X tends to do), but I've come to realize that it's really just lazyness from the developers - there's no good reason behind it, imho.
--- End quote ---

So, in terms of "cases", what do you use for your file names?

PS: the path limit on windows is 260 chars, not 255. And really it's 259 since the last byte is used for the NUL character. Afaik NT and NTFS itself can handle more than this, but the 260-limit is imposed by the win32 layer and just about every application you will find.
--- End quote ---

Thanks f0dder! I wonder where I got this 255 from...  :-[


So, in your opinion -- apart from portability issues with DOS and legacy FS -- there's not real "danger" to stick to my/your current file-naming habits (using multiple periods, Franch Chars, etc.) ? What issues could you encounter?

Armando:
every windows program i used (except for some crappy 8+3 16bit stuff back in the days
was able to handle multiple periods just perfectly fine
/([^\.]+)$/ FTW-gjehle (June 10, 2007, 07:05 PM)
--- End quote ---

Good to know.

and while i'm a friend of the "strict US ascii", "no spaces", "all lower case" i have recently switched to unicode/utf8 for all filesystem related stuff
it's kinda nice to be able to browse folders like this without problems:

--- End quote ---

Nice.
How does one switch to unicode/utf8 in windows? Through the control panel "Regional and Language Options"?  Please forgive my ignorance... :-[

f0dder:
So, in terms of "cases", what do you use for your file names?
-Armando
--- End quote ---
Depends on the purpose. Most of my filenames aren't that long... I tend to use CamelCase for my source code, for some reason I don't like spaces in my .cpp files. For things like word documents, I have spaces and whatnot. When ripping MP3's, I tend to replace spaces with underscores, I sometimes put them on my http server so I can grab them from somewhere else, and some browsers have a habit of replacing space with %20 when downloading, which looks messy.

Thanks f0dder! I wonder where I got this 255 from... :-[
-Armando
--- End quote ---
It's the largest byte-value, and there's probably a few stupid programs out there using this value (yes, some people hardcode these values instead of using MAX_PATH).

So, in your opinion -- apart from portability issues with DOS and legacy FS -- there's not real "danger" to stick to my/your current file-naming habits (using multiple periods, Franch Chars, etc.) ? What issues could you encounter?
-Armando
--- End quote ---
When sticking to western languages, various national chars should be okay - iirc NTFS always stores as unicode, so there's no clashes file-system wise. Most programs are still written for ansi, but as long as you're dealing with a western OEM charset that fits into "narrow" characters, things should work fine.
I guess there _could_ be problems if you receive some files from one language using some characters that can't be mapped to the codepage you're running, and you're using non-unicode apps... but I've never experienced that myself.

Windows does unicode automatically, even for FAT filesystems (though the implementation is damn hacky). I think gjehle is talking about linux where this is/has been problematic?

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page