Re: Valid characters on one o/s are invalid on another

[ian <cheeken () cs bu edu>]

kind of off on a tangent but at windev tony mason from osr
mentioned you can create files with NULLs embedded
in their name if you write a file system driver (this is all windows based obv)

they can't be removed, not only by userland command line/gui tools
but by the win32 api's themselves....

haven't tried it and i'm going on what he told us but it's kinda interesting eh?

ian


"Juan M. Courcoul" wrote:

> Rather than finangling with BASIC, I'd suggest you do this using one of
> the excellent Perl packages:
>
> http://www.perl.com/CPAN-local/ports/index.html#win32
>
> Having obtained that, you can either zap the offending file with a quick
> one-liner, or you can delve as deep as you want within the OS with an
> adequate script. The language, per se, has no restrictions regarding the
> characters of the filename, the size, etc., other than those imposed by
> the underlying filesystem, since you'll be running under the Perl
> interpreter (instead of COMMAND.COM et.al.). Plus you'll have the bonus
> of getting an excellent administration platform, supported on virtually
> any operating system.
>
> JMC
> $x=25;print substr(',rekcah lreP rehtona tsuJ',$x,1) while --$x >= 0
>
> Craig Boston wrote:
> > Tested this both locally and over a network and the wildcard idea was able to
> > get rid of the files ending with a dot.  For the sake of being cautions,
> > "filename?" seems to be able to handle it as well without resorting to *
> >
> > Win2k doesn't come with BASIC, so I snagged a copy of qbasic off one of the
> > NT4 machines.  It doesn't seem to understand long file names so I wasn't able
> > to do anything useful with it.
> >
> > It seems these files (and possibly other files that the shell refuses to deal
> > with) can also be deleted by doing a DIR /X and deleting the DOS 8.3 name
> > directly.  Surprisingly, this seems to work on remote systems over the network
> > as well.
> >
> > The shell should probably still be fixed as there are lots of clueless newbie
> > NT admins who don't know how to use the command-line...  Of course they
> > probably have bigger security problems anyway.
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Meritt James" <meritt_james () bah com>
> >
> > I''ve zapped files with names containing illegal characters by using
> > wildcard that expanded to the particular file...
> >
> > James Robbins wrote:
> > > I ran into a situation (quite a while back) where I had a file on a
> > > DOS machine that had illegal characters in it.  I couldn't rename
> > > or delete it.  I finally got rid of it by going into Basic and deleting
> > > it from there.  Since Basic requires the file name to be in quotes
> > > it accepted it and deleted the file.