[deathanatos]

> That seems like an extremely pathological case.

When a human is creating files by hand, I almost certainly agree. When a program is creating files, however, it's only a matter of time before weird characters wind their way in there.

I really wish newlines had been disallowed. (There's UI implications, in addition to the parsing ones — how do you do a list view with newlines in the filename?; I also wish filenames had a reliable character set and weren't just bytes.)

[bmn_]

I think dwheeler is trying to get this fixed/standardised in POSIX via the Open group.

[oblio]

That it's going to be an uphill battle is an understatement.

Someone replied on LWN, when he posted his proposal, that he had implemented a sort of home-grown database using non-UTF8 characters for the file names.

Rube Goldberg, indeed!

[userbinator]

how do you do a list view with newlines in the filename?

Show them with the standard escape sequence for a newline:

    This\ filename\ncontains\ a\ newline

Same for any other characters that could be considered 'special' in output; I really wish the backslash convention for escaping was more common. Character sets and such are a UI/display issue, so I don't think there should be any special handling for them at the lower levels of the system.

[mjevans]

UI issues; on display format all /printing display elements/ (including spaces as spaces and things that look like whitespace but aren't spaces) with readable glyphs, or those numeric standins for non-rendering glyphs.