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

[Jeremy Allison]

On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 12:03:00PM -0500, Kaleb Harper 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 ' : ' completely, or changes it
> into some other character, I just want to be rid of the 8.3 names. I'm
> hoping that it's something that can be done from Samba so I don't have to
> reconfigure several windows computers, but I'll do whatever it takes if I
> have to :)

There's no way to fix this within Samba. Names containing ":" are
illegal on Windows machines, we have to mangle them. You'll have
to change these names if you want the names to be seen correctly
from Windows.

Jeremy.