Hacker News Reader

Comment by codethief | Hacker News Reader

In a similar move (silently changing a feature crucial to some users), in Android 11 Google suddenly removed the possibility to use "special" characters

  ":<>?|\*

in filenames[0], presumably because they're not allowed on Windows/NTFS and Windows users might end up struggling to transfer them to their Windows computer. I don't care about NTFS at all, though. I just want to be able to sync all my files with my Linux machines and now I'm no longer able to. Makes me want to scream.

[0]: https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/952

View on HN

After throwing away that thing you will never use to creating filenames far beyond 8.3 format, the problem always comes soon after the matter is fully resolved:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29186222

I'm not following?

I have a personal convention that all files I put into my synced folder must consist of lowercase alphanumeric characters, hyphens and periods (to be precise, match the regex /\.?([a-z0-9]([-.][a-z0-9])?)+/). It saves a lot of pain.

And you don’t see why Google would cater to Windows and a Mac users at the expense of Linux users?

macOS can also handle files with any of those characters in the filename, it's only Windows that's affected.

You mean 90% of desktop users…

I am surprised that the # symbol isn’t on the list.

Not colon.

It can handle files with colon in the name fine, Finder just won't let you name them like that. The files themselves work fine if you created them in the Terminal/through sync.

Classic MacOS used colon as a path separator, so to support creating files that could be opened on classic MacOS the Finder disallows it.

What types of files are you syncing that have those characters in their names?

Personal notes, and tons of academic papers and ebooks, all of which might contain question marks and colons. Occasionally, I also use arrows -> in travel itineraries / ticket PDFs.

Putting a star into a filename is a pain in the ass, no matter the OS.

Escaping and quoting isn’t really that hard

Yes and who needs Dropbox since for a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com