[TriLUG] Problem on Fedora 8

[Brian McCullough]

On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 06:46:16PM -0400, Alexander Ray wrote:
> I hope this isn't too obvious a question, but why are invisible characters
> allowed in filenames?  As far as I know the name doesn't affect it's node,
> so the file name is just for the human's benefit.  If we can't read it,
> whats the use?

Filenames are not restricted to humans.  A program could easily write a
filename that had a sequence number implemented as a char tacked on to
the end of the human-readable part.

loga
logb
logc and so on simply adding one to the last character until you have
256 different log files.  If the file is intended only for the program
to manipulate, there is no requirement that the file name be
human-readable.  Some people may not agree with the programmer who
designed it that way, but in UNIX, this is perfectly reasonable.


Brian