Linux/Unix naming conventions...

[sgordon at kenan.com (Seth Gordon)]

When I was an undergrad, a group of students set up a project to develop some kind of
networking software.  (I'm being extremely vague about the software itself because (a)
the project died long ago; (b) at the time, I didn't really understand what they were
doing.)

In the directory that this project used, there was one subdirectory named "challenge!"
(with the exclamation point, but without the quotes).

When I tried to refer to or use this directory, I had no end of trouble.  My shell used
! as the escape character for "history substitution" (so that if you'd previously
entered a "mail" command, for example, you could just type "m!" to repeat it, etc.), and
it would perform this substitution even if I put a backslash before the exclamation
point.  Sometimes I had to use two backslashes, sometimes three, to get what I wanted.

The leader of the project took pity on me, and renamed the directory to just plain
"challenge".

--seth

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