[unison-hackers] Colons and slashes in OS X file names

Benjamin Pierce bcpierce at cis.upenn.edu
Sat Mar 12 12:22:56 EST 2005


I believe this is fixed in the new release.

   - Benjamin

> 
>    Using unison version 2.9.20 under OS X 10.3.x (Panther), and I've
>    noticed
>    that unison will not deal with files that contain a colon ":" in the
>    file
>    name and claims that that character is not allowed in file names.
>    Actually, it can be used... sort of.  The POSIX interface allows
>    colons,
>    but the finder interface does not.  The finder does allow slashes "/"
>    though, while I believe that the POSIX interface does not.   What
>    happens
>    is if you use the finder to create a file with a name like "file/name"
>    then from the terminal it appears to be "file:name".  Conversely, if
>    you make "file:name" using a POSIX program then in the finder it looks
>    like "file/name".
>    Obviously : and / should be avoided when naming files because it will
>    likely lead to confusion.  However if unison sees a file with a ":" in
>    it, then it should go ahead and work with it, after possibly issuing a
>    warning to the user if being used interactively.
>    I know that some work on unison is currently being done for improved
>    OS
>    X
>    support, and I did not look at the development version to see if
>    things
>    have changed from what I saw with 2.9.20.  I'm just tossing out the
>    information about the : / behavior on the off chance that the people
>    working on the OS X changes did not already know about it.  (I found
>    it
>    out mostly by accident.)
>                                  - James
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