What to do about filenames legal in Linux but illegal in Windows?

[Dan Kegel]

Linux users create files with names that are legal in Linux but not
in Windows, simply because they can.
Eventually they'll try to read those files in a Windows app,
either by carrying them on a flash drive over to a real windows
system, by dual booting, or by running the app in Wine.

Now, normally, Wine should do exactly what Windows does.
(I believe that in both Windows and Wine, directory listings
will show these illegal chars, but attempts to open the files will fail.)

But let's say we're in that happy time in the near future
when lots of companies are willing to ship their apps
with Wine as a halfway house to native support, and
lots of their users start running into this issue.
Can/should such apps tell Windows or Wine "Oh, go ahead
and let me open those funny files?"

On Wine, of course, we could open up a hole if we had to,
but it'd be nice to know if there were a method that
also worked on Windows.

I looked around a bit today for a way to open such files in
Windows, and failed miserably (though I did find a nice
example of how to use NtCreateFile without the DDK).
Anyone know of a way on real Windows to do this?

[Saulius Krasuckas]

* On Mon, 21 Apr 2008, Dan Kegel wrote:
> (I believe that in both Windows and Wine, directory listings
> will show these illegal chars, but attempts to open the files will 
> fail.)

...
> I looked around a bit today for a way to open such files in
> Windows, and failed miserably 
>   ...
> Anyone know of a way on real Windows to do this?

For a files that were at least "undeletable" I remember I have been using 
a feature of Total Commander to switch format of files displayed to a 
Short/Long form.  Not all files give up for me this way, but half of them 
did, though.

[Chris Howe]

Would the right way to handle such files be to use the
FUSE filesystem (when it's done) to hide them from
apps?

On the one hand it sidesteps the problem, but as
a recent blog post by Microsoft's Raymond Chen
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/04/14/8389268.aspx
shows, it IS possible to get into this kind of problem
in Windows too.

---
Chris

[Dan Kegel]

On Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 10:57 PM, Saulius Krasuckas <saulius2(a)ar.fi.lt> wrote:
> * On Mon, 21 Apr 2008, Dan Kegel wrote:
> > (I believe that in both Windows and Wine, directory listings
> > will show these illegal chars, but attempts to open the files will
> > fail.)
>
> For a files that were at least "undeletable" I remember I have been using
>  a feature of Total Commander to switch format of files displayed to a
>  Short/Long form.  Not all files give up for me this way, but half of them
>  did, though.

Yes, I had forgotten about short names because I had been working
on *creating* illegal files, not reading them.
Picasa does in fact work on Windows when presented with *directories*
that have illegal names, and I suspect this is because it uses the
short names and the expands them before display.
(It doesn't seem to work with them on Wine yet; that's on my to-do list to
find out why.)
- Dan