8 bit filenames?

[Paul Slootman]

On Wed 27 Oct 2004, Dan Stromberg wrote:
> 
> Are there any characters that can occur in filenames that will choke
> rsync?
> 
> We're transferring lots of data, and some of our users' filenames appear
> to have their high bit set.
> 
> I don't expect it to cope with filenames having a \0 or / in them
> (sometimes created over appletalk shares - strange but true), but it'd
> be great to know if rsync can handle all other characters, or only
> "normal" characters.

rsync doesn't do anything with the individual bytes in a filename; to
rsync it's just a string of characters.  That said, a null byte will of
course serve to terminate the string there... and a slash will be
interpreted as a directory separator (although I'm not familiar enough
with the rsync internals to know whether rsync explicitly checks for
'/').

I've transferred filenames with all sorts of wierd characters with rsync
without any problem.

One potential problem is if the character set on the two systems is
different. Because rsync does nothing with the bytes, a system that uses
e.g. UTF8 and a system that uses iso8859-1 will show the same string of
bytes differently if there are any 8-bit chars used...


Paul Slootman