Party like it's 1975
Every once in awhile, I stop and wonder just how advanced our computers will need to be to handle anything in a file name beyond an underscore or period safely. It's amazing to me how, in mid-2005, so much of my computing experience is governed by a bizarre awareness of beginning or trailing periods, spaces, slashes, underscores and colons in file names.
Perhaps I'm jaded, but I expected to be able to swear properly by now. And where the hell is my damn rocket pack.
Posted by drunkenbatmanJuly 26, 2005, at 11:44 PM
Comments (18)
Posted by: Jason Terhorst at July 27, 2005 12:02 AM
Sorry. *A 1985 film - called "Back to the Future". I forgot to preview my post. *red face*
Posted by: Nick at July 27, 2005 12:06 AM
And where the %^$& is my floating skateboard?
Posted by: Cap'n Hector at July 27, 2005 12:28 AM
I'm sorry, I've developed both rocket packs *and* flying skateboards, but threats of litigation from patent holders (Dunlop and Nike, respectively) has prevented me from releasing them.
Posted by: pffffft at July 27, 2005 01:36 AM
Funny. I get what you're saying, but OS X has FAR fewer limitations than Windows for filenames.
Posted by: Matthew at July 27, 2005 02:55 AM
Our customers' order numbers contain slashes. Very annoying that you can't save the order with that number in it's file name. Does seem odd to me. With everything we can do (they just launched more people into space on the back of a giant rocket) it does appear wuite bizarre that the smallest of requirements can't be met.
Posted by: Matthew at July 27, 2005 02:56 AM
Our customers' order numbers often contain forward slashes. Very annoying that you can't save the order with that number in it's file name. Does seem odd to me. With everything we can do (they just launched more people into space on the back of a giant rocket) it does appear quite bizarre that the smallest of requirements can't be met.
Posted by: ssp at July 27, 2005 03:01 AM
To be fair it's the colon only vs. all the rest of Unicode... Annoying but much less annoying than anything else i know.
And if you really _need_ to use the colon in file names, you could still use the Terminal ;)
... or try the fullwidth one (?) or a smaller version (?)
Posted by: Twist at July 27, 2005 03:37 AM
Hehe. Just last Thursday in my Illustrator class one of the other students was using some app and it was completely paralyzed by a simple space in the file name. I can't remember if it was Illustrator or something else but I found it to be rather ridiculous that it couldn't handle a simple space. Of course web servers are just as bad.
Posted by: LEGO Boy at July 27, 2005 07:11 AM
What the heck is Glenda doing on your dock?!?!? Do you also have the Space Glenda? - http://cm.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/glenda.html
Posted by: lagroue at July 27, 2005 08:26 AM
If it was only that... On 10.3 (didn't try in 10.4) I put a dot (.) in a Font collection name.
A dot. Like in, say, the F. word...
All my collections were lost.
Posted by: Rory at July 27, 2005 09:07 AM
Colons are the path delimiter for HFS file paths which is why you can't use them in file names. It's a pain but it's required for backwards compatibility with Classic and Carbon.
Posted by: Ankalon at July 27, 2005 10:21 AM
Hey LEGO boy: I agree. DB needs to do some explaining. Is it your skinned QT player for "Plan 9 From Outer Space?" It's definitely an obscure pun.
Plan 9 logo ... Plan 9 movie.
I'll be quiet now.
Posted by: M at July 27, 2005 12:40 PM
From the list of things we've known since 1984:
* one is the maximum acceptable number of 'forbidden characters' for a filesystem.
Posted by: Gareth Potter at July 27, 2005 04:02 PM
Yeah, whenever this sort of thing screws me over, I just cackle and am thankful for the Japanese language (and, I suppose, other languages which use double-byte characters).
It is with pleasure that I present you with this "：" for your colonic enjoyment. Feel free to copy-paste.
:P
(I realise that I have failed the "do endeavor to appear sane" requirement in posting the above, but we all do silly things every now and then...)
Posted by: superfunkomatic at July 27, 2005 05:40 PM
what? you mean you're not using 8.3 file naming conventions? shame on you. ;)
Posted by: lagroue at July 28, 2005 06:15 AM
Rory : "Colons are the path delimiter for HFS file paths which is why you can't use them in file names. It's a pain but it's required for backwards compatibility with Classic and Carbon."
Some of us who are technical guys understand that.
M : "one is the maximum acceptable number of 'forbidden characters' for a filesystem."
Some of us who put away their technical brain when doing non technical stuff also understand Apple's software is losing quality.
On OS9, we had File descriptors and aliased to retreive files. They were robust. Now, it's like there were paths everywhere, broken on any moving of a file. Try moving a startup item, for example. It's not funny at all.
Plus applications recreating files on Save command, breaking my icons placement. So many do that that I guess it's in the standard document class, provided by Apple.
NeXT did also bring lousy things.
Posted by: Linden at July 29, 2005 10:17 AM
(they just launched more people into space on the back of a giant rocket)
Ironically, the giant rocket in question is 20 years old, and a member of an aging fleet that millions of dollars can't successfully update. So much for "Return to Flight." Dead PR people everywhere are rolling frantically in their graves. Please, NASA, I want space elevators and teleporters, and missions to Mars. I'm half expecting Germans to launch a rocket to the moon out of a gigantic vat of water in search of gold. (who gets that reference?)
*snip rant*
Remember guys,
The Future is 1997.
I agree. Where is that flying car I was promised? The 1985 film shows hovercars and shoes that tie themselves - with the goal date of 2015. Can we do all that in 10 years?