Re: ProDOS filenames

[Roger Johnstone <rojaws@orcon.net.nz>]

In <dd3vb0$6g3$1@News.Dal.Ca> Simon D. Williams wrote:

> Just curious... why are there so many invalid characters for prodos 
> file names? It seems to me that "/" is the only one that really _needs_ 
> to be disallowed...

I think someone was overcompensating for DOS. Apple DOS has a limit of 
30 characters, and you can use just about any character you like, 
including control characters. A simple security trick you could use to 
stop someone from accessing your files was to do something like RENAME 
My Secret File,My Secret Fil<control-A>e. When someone catalogued the 
disk all they saw was My Secret File, but LOAD My Secret File would 
always produce FILE NOT FOUND :o> Programs like Copy II+ will show these 
hidden control characters though.

There really is no reason for ProDOS's character limitation though. 
There's a program called QFix (I think) that patches ProDOS to allow 
most characters to be used. It works very well, although there is the 
occasional program which does its own filename checking and refuses to 
load a file with invalid characters. You just have to make sure the 
files used with that program use the regular ProDOS characters.


-- 
Roger Johnstone, Invercargill, New Zealand
http://vintageware.orcon.net.nz/
________________________________________________________________________
  No Silicon Heaven? Preposterous! Where would all the calculators go?

              Kryten, from the Red Dwarf episode "The Last Day"