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RE: [stellation-res] Database location specifier
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At 08:19 AM 4/20/2003, Jonathan Gossage wrote:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: stellation-res-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:stellation-res-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Jim Wright -
> IBM Research
> Sent: Saturday, April 19, 2003 1:52 PM
> To: stellation-res@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Cc: stellation
> Subject: Re: [stellation-res] Database location specifier
>
>
> Jonathan,
>
> Based on a quick Google search:
>
> Windows filename characters:
> Legal: A-Z 0-9 $#&@!()-{}'`_~ and the space
> Illegal: |<>\^+=?/[]";,* plus control characters
>
> Linux:
> Characters often recognized as metacharacters by Linux shells:
>
> * ? [ ] " ' ` \ $ ; & ( ) | ^ < > newline space tab
>
> So -- taking the intersection of both sets (more or less):
> | <> \ ^ ? [] " ; *
>
> Checking the man page for bash (Bourne-Again shell)
> yields the following:
> 1. "Enclosing characters between single quotes preserves
> the literal value of each character within the quotes."
> 2. "Enclosing characters between double quotes preserves
> the literal value of each character within the quotes, with
> the exception of $ (dollar sign) ` (backtick) and \
> (backslash)."
>
> Since single quote is a legal Windows filename character,
> I propose:
> a) Use ; (semicolon) as the delimiter within a database locator.
> b) Double-quote the entire locator to force command-line processors
> to process the locator as a single entity.
> Thus:
> "This;is a complete;locator;in five;parts."
>
> Thoughts?
>
> - Jim
>
This would work for FAT32 volumes but NTFS is more liberal. The only
reserved characters are < > : " / \ | and the control characters. The
semi-colon is a legal file name character for NTFS.
How about '|' (vertical bar, pipe, binary OR, etc.) ?
This appears to be illegal as a filename character on all systems we're
likely to
care about (famous last words....)
I am also reluctant to
require special quoting rules over and above those that are normal for a
shell. Quoting would also mean additional parsing code in Stellation.
Quoting is required with filenames that include spaces, on both Windows and
Linux.
While it does require some extra parsing, handling double quotes isn't a
lot of work
(but of course, another place for bugs to creep in...).
You had previously suggested:
2. Continue with the current support using the '+' as the location
separator. This would have the limitation that any Windows based Firebird
database could not have a '+' character in it's path.
That also seems like a reasonable solution (least-impact for our coding,
certainly).
The restriction re: database names seems unlikely to cause problems.
Anyone else? Barring other comment, I'd vote to keep using '+' with the caveat
about database names stated clearly in the docs.
Regards,
Jim
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Wright, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
*** The Stellation project: Advanced SCM for Collaboration
*** http://www.eclipse.org/stellation
*** Work Email: jwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx ------- Personal Email:
jim.wright@xxxxxxx
