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0 pointsnerdponx5y ago0 comments

I agree. Personally I think the Linux kernel should have a compilation-time option to disallow various special characters in filenames such as ASCII control characters and colons, so users who want to maintain a sane system can give themselves the option to do so.

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AnIdiotOnTheNet5y ago

So um, how would you work with files that came from a foreign file system? Would the kernel just crash when it sees them? Would they be effectively untouchable, like filenames with a '/' encoded in them?

skissane5y ago

Previously, I proposed addressing this with a mount option and a filesystem volume flag [1]. The mount option would prevent creating new files/directories with "bad names" but would still allow accessing ones which already exist. The filesystem volume flag would make bad names on that volume be considered fsck errors. (If the kernel found such a bad name on a volume with the flag enabled, it should log that as a filesystem error, and either return an IO error, or just pretend the file doesn't exist – whatever Linux does now when it finds a file on disk whose name contains a null byte or forward slash.)

Using a mount option and/or filesystem volume flag means it works fine with legacy volumes which might contain those bad names. On such legacy volumes, either that volume flag is not supported by the filesystem, or else it is but is disabled for that particular volume. If you mount it with the mount option, you can still access bad names on that volume, you just can't create new ones; if you need to create new bad names, you just (re)mount it with the mount option disabled.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22873153

enriquto5y ago

and spaces! ;)

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