Re: Elementary fie naming question
Re: Elementary fie naming question
- Subject: Re: Elementary fie naming question
- From: Graff <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 10 Jan 2004 13:22:15 -0500
It is generally a bad idea to use certain characters in names. Those
characters are mainly forward slashes (/) and colons (:). The forward
slash is a path delimiter for the shell environment and the colon is a
path delimiter for the Finder.
It used to be that if you specified a date as part of a name in the
Finder and it had a format of xx/xx/xx it would automatically change to
xx-xx-xx. It now looks like the Finder leaves that untouched, which is
potentially a bad thing. If a shell tool is used on a name that has
forward slashes in it then that name could get misinterpreted. For
example a file with the name aaa/bbb in the Desktop folder would be
referenced like this in the shell:
/Users/username/Desktop/aaa/bbb
To the shell that looks like file bbb in directory aaa in directory
Desktop, and so on.
The same thing happens for files with a colon in them in the Finder,
although it is rarer to have a problem there due to the fact that the
Finder doesn't depend on paths as much. Here's how the file aaa:bbb
looks in the Finder:
Macintosh HD:Users:username:Desktop:aaa:bbb
Again, a similar problem to the shell, the Finder can sometimes
interpret this as file bbb in folder aaa in folder Desktop, and so on.
Another example of confusion, I named a folder "Date 10/20/02" on the
Desktop in the Finder. When I did a listing of the Desktop through the
shell environment that same folder was named "Date 10:20:02". This
sort of conversion is useful under certain circumstances but it also
has potential to cause big problems.
Best bet is to entirely avoid using forward slashes and colons in your
file and folder names. This will steer clear of any confusion and bugs
that might pop up due to the handling of those file names.
- Ken
On Jan 10, 2004, at 12:31 PM, Axel Luttgens wrote:
Graff wrote:
The problem is the underlying Unix-like nature of Mac OS X. You
can't have a file name that has a slash (/) in it because that
character is used for separating directories. In the Finder all
slashes (/) are automatically translated to dashes (-).
I'm not sure to fully understand what you mean.
This one:
tell application "Finder"
make new file at desktop with properties {name:"aaa/bbb"}
end tell
--> document file "aaa/bbb" of folder "Desktop"...
allows to create a file named "aaa/bbb" that appears as such on the
Desktop.
On the other hand, doing an ls in the shell, I get:
-rw-r--r-- 1 luttgens luttgens 0 10 Jan 18:19 aaa:bbb
That is, a substitution occured, but with a ":" (quite a nice trick).
Weren't you in fact thinking about the impossibility to create, in the
Finder, an item whose name contains a ":"?
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