Recently we discovered that our tool that creates digital archives (copies of online project rooms) had a couple of minor bugs, which we are currently fixing. They turned up on account of the fact that linux file systems can hack almost anything, whereas Windows’ file and folder name conventions are prehistoric – think Win 3.1.
Seat belts fastened? Did you know that you cannot have folder names with a trailing space? Dots “.” at the end of file names aren’t permitted, either. Same for any \/*<>?:”| chars in your file/folder names. To top it up, the maximum path length permitted is 255 characters.
Whoa, these are problems that cannot even be overcome by Samba. However our customers expect the archived data (which is created on a Linux box) to be in a Windows compatible format, so we trim and convert incompatible “weeds” wherever possible, like a good gardener. Of course our clever project room technology allows for more complex folder structures with an unlimited path length. We solved this problem by providing a browsable HTML file that allows you to explore the overlength files including all metadata and contents.
If you know of further char incompatibilities in file and folder names then put your comment here. We’re eager to make our software bug free!
Device Names (con, aux, …) are also not allowed, even with an extension (con.txt …). And there are hacks to create and access files with a path longer than 255 chars, as long as the underlying files system supports them.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/bclteam/archive/2007/02/13/long-paths-in-net-part-1-of-3-kim-hamilton.aspx