[Samba] Question marks, asterisks, colons in filenames

[Sven Tegethoff]

On 20.02.2013 10:37, Jonathan Buzzard wrote:
> The issue is that you have been abusing your file system to store 
> metadata in the file names. A practice that is always going to end in 
> trouble. For example what do you do when a filename for your chosen 
> metadata format exceeds the maximum length for your particular file 
> system? 

Filesystem abuse? Call the cops! :) First ... filenames ARE metadata. 
They have never been meant  to be anything else. So it's of course 
perfectly valid to use and abuse them for whatever fits your use case - 
people have been doing that since files exist, and half of your /bin 
directory consists of tools helping you doing just that.

What we have here is a problem of two incompatible text fields, and it 
does not make a difference if that incompatibility is a filenames in a 
file system or some table in some kind of non-filesytem media library. 
If you can't fix the incompatibility and if you can't change the 
underlying process that generates the data to only create names that fit 
the lowest common denominator all systems can handle, the obvious 
solution is to put in some kind of translation rule.

You're not always in a position to redesign a business process from 
ground up, that's why being an expert in shoving square pegs in round 
holes is one of the most well-paid jobs in the IT industry :)

-- 

Mit freundlichen Grüßen

Sven Tegethoff
EDV-Team

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