For maximum safety, I would indeed use only alphanumerics, dash, and
underscore. Some people have an aversion to spaces, but they are easy
to render safe by approprite quoting. Everything else is thin ice on
one platform or another...

On 2/7/10, Walter J. Murray <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> I'm trying to figure out what characters are really safe to use in file
> names in the HFS namespace.  Here's what MPE HELP has to say (in HELP
> BUILD):
>
> File names can begin with, and contain, any of the
> following characters:
>     a-z, A-Z, 0-9, _, ., ~, `, $, %, ^, *, {, },+,|,:
>  File names can contain (but not begin with ) a
> dash (-).
>
> I've learned to avoid the period (dot) in any file that I might want to
> transfer to a Windows system (unless I use it in a way that makes sense
> to Windows, for example, as a file name extension designating a file
> type).
>
> I'm going to avoid the dollar sign in any file that I might transfer to
> a UNIX system, to avoid possibly confusing the shell.
>
> Likewise, I'll avoid using the asterisk because of its use as a wildcard
> character on other platforms.
>
> I was recently surprised to learn that the percent character has
> problems in MPE.  If I STORE and RESTORE a file with a percent sign in
> its name, it seems that the percent sign and all following characters
> are dropped from the name.  (Am I missing something here?)
>
> What other characters might cause problems?
>
> To be completely safe, do I need to restrict myself to uppercase and
> lowercase letters, digits, and underscores?
>
> Walter
>
> Walter J. Murray
>
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