[Samba] linux -> windows special characters in filenames problems

[John Drescher]

On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 1:03 PM, Kaleb Harper <kaleb.tmp at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm running Samba 3.32 on my linux server to share files with the windows
> computers on the network. My problem is that windows doesn't support some
> special characters in filenames, like ' : ', that linux has no problem with.
> So something (not sure if it's Samba or windows) is mangling directory/file
> names containing that character into 8.3 names, which makes it very
> difficult to know from windows what's in the directories; I'm having to open
> each directory to see the contents, which is quite an annoyance. Here's a
> couple of examples of how it's mangling directory names:
>
>
> 'this: is a test'    is getting turned into        'THUKO5~M'
> 'this: is another test'        is getting turned into        'TPYQ1X~Y'
>
>
> Since I suspect there's not an easy way to get windows to understand the ' :
> ' and various other characters that it probably doesn't understand properly,
> I was hoping there was a way to change the mangling to something more
> readable. I don't care if it removes the ' : '

It would have to

: is an illegal character as a file or folder name in windows.

This was a result of drive letters being c: d: ...


John