Linux/Unix naming conventions...

[Jerry Feldman]

John is correct. The file system does not care about spaces. The shells 
treat spaces as delimiters. You can have file names with unprintable 
characters in them, and the file system would not care.
You can create:"A File With a funny name" by enclosing it in quotes. (Check 
the shell man pages on the use of single and double quotes for the shell 
you are using). Naming conventions have no meaning to the system, but may 
have meanings to some applications and GUI file managers.
A script, xxx.pl with line 1 as:
#!/usr/bin/ksh

is a korn shell script and the Korn shell will be invoked. A script, 
xxx.csh with the first line:
#!/usr/bin/perl

is a perl script. 

Note that /etc/mime.types relates MIME types to extentions, and when 
attaching a file of a listed extention, your email program will probably 
generate the appropriate MIME type.

Seth Gordon wrote:
> "John Chambers,,,781-647-1813" wrote:
> 
> > The only characters that have special meaning
> > to the Unix file system are slash and null.
> 
> Not to disagree, but to supplement: some utilities assume, by default, that file
> names don't have any spaces in them.  (For example, they will interpret a group of
> words separated by spaces as a group of filenames.)  Therefore, creating files
> with embedded spaces is Generally Not Done, although it's technically possible,
> and there are ways to coerce the rest of Unix into treating them properly.
-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org


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