RE: ftp study (technical report)

[Aydin Edguer <[e-mail]>]

> : f) Care should be taken when naming or renaming files in archives. The
> : truism that names should be meaningful takes on a greater significance
> : in this environment since this is often all that the remote user has
> : to work with when trying to discover the contents of the file without
> : actually retrieving it. If one is caching a file from another FTP
> : site, renaming is usually not recommended since the ability to
> : determine if the two files contain identical information can be lost.
> : Some operating systems allow the use of whitespace and non printable
> : characters in filenames but their use is strongly discouraged since
> : this can make the file inaccessible to the remote user.  Additionally,
> : characters such as '@', '!', '|', or "_" may not be available or may
> : have special significance on remote systems and should be used with
> : caution.
> 
> Why strongly discourage some characters which have special significance on
> some systems, but not other characters with special significance on others? 
> My point is that, in an attempt to be more user friendly, the period should
> also be considered -- HEAVILY considered -- on IAFA's.

Because the considerations are _NOT_ the same.  The pipe or bar symbol
has special significance to some operating systems.  It cannot be used
in a name without the name taking on another meaning.  The period or dot
is not the same.  Some systems have problems with MULTIPLE periods but
no one yet has pointed out a system that will not accept A period within
a filename.  Thus there is a real difference between the period and the
pipe or space characters.  There are systems which use seven bit only
and thus non-ASCII characters [128-255] cannot even be generated.
Similarly there are some systems where non-printable characters [0-32]
cause the program to abort.  Thus the user does not have the option of
even renaming the file during transfer.

That is the reason for strongly discouraging one and not another.

Your example of "ifi-92_13.ps.Z" can be obtained by systems using renaming
to "ifi-92_13.ps_z" if needed.  Just as "ifi-92_13.ps_z" can be renamed to
"ifi92_13.psz" if needed [or are you just for your convenience and not for
the overwhelming number of MS-DOS users convenience - in strict numbers
there are probably more IBM-PC compatibles than any other computer].

I do agree with you that the reasons for some of the considerations
could be documented so that people can make up their own minds.  I
do agree with you that putting in a note that VMS and MS-DOS are limited
to a single period in a file name and other such information is useful
and should be documented.  I disagree that the number of periods should
be limited or discouraged.

Aydin Edguer