What to do about filenames legal in Linux but illegal in Windows?

Dan Kegel dank at kegel.com
Mon Apr 21 22:58:21 CDT 2008


Linux users create files with names that are legal in Linux but not
in Windows, simply because they can.
Eventually they'll try to read those files in a Windows app,
either by carrying them on a flash drive over to a real windows
system, by dual booting, or by running the app in Wine.

Now, normally, Wine should do exactly what Windows does.
(I believe that in both Windows and Wine, directory listings
will show these illegal chars, but attempts to open the files will fail.)

But let's say we're in that happy time in the near future
when lots of companies are willing to ship their apps
with Wine as a halfway house to native support, and
lots of their users start running into this issue.
Can/should such apps tell Windows or Wine "Oh, go ahead
and let me open those funny files?"

On Wine, of course, we could open up a hole if we had to,
but it'd be nice to know if there were a method that
also worked on Windows.

I looked around a bit today for a way to open such files in
Windows, and failed miserably (though I did find a nice
example of how to use NtCreateFile without the DDK).
Anyone know of a way on real Windows to do this?



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