Hi Jason,

On Wed, Jan 15, 2025 at 11:21:02AM -0500, Jason Yundt wrote:

quoted

Makes sense.  How about a null-terminated string?

The term null-terminated string still has some of the problems that I
mentioned earlier.  Specifically, people think of null-terminated
strings as sequences of characters.  It’s easier to understand how the
kernel handles paths if you think of paths as sequences of bytes, not as
sequences of characters.

Hmmm, okay.  Maybe I'm too biased as a C programmer, and this being a
generic page for users it makes sense to use other terms.
 

That being said, I think that you misunderstood my two questions.  You
told me the current state of things.  I’m not asking about the current
state of things, I’m asking about a hypothetical future where programs
started to “assume the Portable Filename Character Set (or at most some
subset of ASCII), and fail hard outside of that”.  If we start making
that recommendation and programs start following that recommendation,
then it sounds like I wouldn’t be able to do anything with a large part
of my music collection,

You could rename that music into something usable, and then use it.  :)

and it sounds like I wouldn’t be able to use the
symbolic links that are in my /dev/disks/by-partlabel directory.  Am I
understanding your recommendation correctly?

I would be happy in a world where all tools are restricted to the
portable filename character set.  I once toyed with a patch for
enforcing such filenames in the kernel, just for fun.

On the other hand, I see the usefulness for others in programs trying to
work with other stuff.  So the manual page makes sense, and I'll swallow
my disagreement.  :-)


Have a lovely day!
Alex

-- 
<https://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>