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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