fudging filename characters

[Paul Green]

Paul Slootman <paul at debian.org> wrote:
>There are a couple of bug reports on the Debian rsync package about
>problems with a recipient filesystem that can't cope with all possible
>unix filenames.  Notably filenames with question marks are a problem...
>I guess that people are trying to backup systems to a SMB share which
>presumably is then regularly backupped to tape. This basically sounds
>like a reasonable thing to do :-)
>
>Would there be much opposition to an option to mangle filenames if
>necessary? In its most trivial form, all characters besides a-zA-z0-9_.-
>would be mapped to e.g. _ . Of course, restoring these would be a lot of
>work, but at least the rsync transfer would work.

Seems to me that rsync is only one of dozens of utilities that is affected by 
such restrictions.  I object to trying to fix this in rsync.  Seems to me that 
people could write a shell script that would copy & rename the files or 
directories to some other location, and rsync from there. Or they could fix up 
their file names, or complain to their vendors.  (I must admit that I work for a 
company that has a product whose file system does not permit question mark, 
number sign, percent sign, or several other characters to appear in file names. 
But I still don't support changing rsync or any other command to deal with 
this).

Thanks
PG
--
Paul Green, Senior Technical Consultant, Stratus Technologies.
Voice: +1 978-461-7557; FAX: +1 978-461-3610
Speaking from Stratus not for Stratus