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?
* 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.
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
On Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 10:57 PM, Saulius Krasuckas saulius2@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
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Chris Howe -
Dan Kegel -
Saulius Krasuckas