Illegal characters WTF



  •  

    This message was posted a few days, while I agree some of the characters are a problems I was rather surprised to see some others.  What are peoples thoughts?

    ----- IT Message ----- 

    Hi,
    As part of IT's regular check it has been found that some folders and files in your shared drive folder contain illegal characters. This means that these may not be backed up in the nightly or weekly backup. Could you please remind staff in your area to avoid using the following characters in folder and file names, and to change the names of current files and folders if it's important that they are backed up.

    Illegal characters:
    !  @  #  $  %   ^  &  )   (  =  +  -  

    :  ;  ,  "   >   <   ]   [   }   {  TM  ©  ®

    Regards
    IT Service Desk



  • Wow, no brackets of any kind allowed. Sucktacular!



  • + (plus) and - (hyphen) are both pretty friggin' common in filenames.

     e.g. the lost+found directory.

    Sounds like IT's backup script uses a pretty braindead regex.
     



  • Or they might be using a plain ISO-9660 filesystem (which isn't amused by many symbols, + and - included) somewhere in the mix.  But using ISO-9660 for a backup would probably be a WTF in and of itself . . .



  • @SomeGuy said:

    Or they might be using a plain ISO-9660 filesystem (which isn't amused by many symbols, + and - included) somewhere in the mix.  But using ISO-9660 for a backup would probably be a WTF in and of itself . . .

    On the other hand, it'd be quite permanent as long as you avoid the rewritable stuff and store the media where they can't get scratched.

    But given that the trademark and copyright symbols are also "bad", I'd say the "backing-up-to-CD" reason is more probable than "braindead-regex" (who the eff needs a regex anyway? recursive copy and/or globbing will do what's needed well enough)

    (edit: though now I think about it, backup-to-CD can be done without mangling filenames - tar up the directory)



  • That reminds me of BTs line checking tool - Woosh, I think it was called - that UK ADSL provides (before LLU, anyway) have to use.

    The later versions of it allowed you to select "other" as the problem you were testing for (it has a knack of making assumptions and skipping tests that would otherwise be useful), that requires you to enter a short description of the problem you are testing for (I guess they record these to try and improve the tool in future).

    Allowed characters were alpha-numeric characters, and '.'.

    Not space.

    That's right, you description had to be one word, as it would complain if you put a space in there. 



  • @SpoonMeiser said:

    That's right, you description had to be one word, as it would complain if you put a space in there. 

    Wowthatsamazing.IsignedupwithTDWTFjusttorespondtothispost.Unbelievable.


     



  • For those interested, I found out the backup software is Arcserve and the server OS is Netware 6 (maybe?).  I was also told that to fix illegal characters they used a Macintosh.

    <FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3></FONT> 



  • @ConfusedFormerTechie said:

    Wowthatsamazing.IsignedupwithTDWTFjusttorespondtothispost.Unbelievable.
    This reminds me of a wonderful javascript on some support site that managed to eat all spaces you entered if you used Opera. Unfortunately, I didn't keep that script, it was a nice source of WTFs.



  • @ender said:

    This reminds me of a wonderful javascript on some support site that managed to eat all spaces you entered if you used Opera. Unfortunately, I didn't keep that script, it was a nice source of WTFs.

    Hmm, that wouldn't happen to have been forum4designers, would it? [1]  This post would suggest that they've done such a thing at one point, but I don't know whether the guy who posted it was using Opera.  Unfortunately, that sub-thread seems to have been removed from the forum4designers web site, so it's no longer possible to see it "in action". 

    [1] Background: forum4designers is a web forum that mirrors various web development-related Usenet groups.  It's rather unpopular with the regulars of many of said groups, due to various technical shortcomings, and also because it doesn't clearly state its relationship with Usenet.  (I haven't been reading any of those groups for a while now though, so it's not impossible that things have improved.)


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