[Samba] Enabling filenames with ?, *, etc ?

[Jeremy Allison]

On Fri, May 05, 2006 at 06:41:33PM -0700, Jeremy Friesner wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I know it's not an encouraged practice, but is there some secret setting I can 
> put in my smb.conf file so that smbd will allow the user to have asterisks, 
> question marks, etc in his file names?  My server is used in an environment 
> where all the client OS's are fairly modern (SUSE Linux 10.x, MacOS/X 10.4.x, 
> and Windows XP only), so backwards compatibility with legacy OS's isn't a 
> concern... and it seems silly that even though both the client's file system 
> and the server's file system (ext3) can handle the file name, the 
> file-transfer protocol refuses to deal with it.

If you're using Samba 3.0.22 then clients using Steve French's cifsfs
(which supports the CIFS UNIX extensions) will allow full POSIX semantics
on filenames (case sensitive, unix permitten names etc.) negotiated by
default. Unfortunately Mac clients don't do this yet (although I've
hopes they will adopt it eventually). Windows clients obviously can't
negotiate this as * ? etc are reserved names for them.

Jeremy.