Re: OT but somewhat relevant: & in file names

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from "Patricia M. Godfrey"
 on Sat, 04 Aug 2007 19:01:03 -0400


> Can anyone point me to a site or list (other than
> Microsludge's own, which is about nothing but Vista
> nowadays, and anyway you have to use IE to go there) where
> this kind of thing is discussed with both technical acumen
> and reasonable grammar?

Reasonable grammar? I'll try. In most modern operating system,
"&" concatenates two or more instructions on a single command
line; the instructions are executed sequentially. If you wish
to mention char "&" as a string literal rather than use it as
the concatenation unary, you must escape it. In some languages
you simply double it "&&", in Win32 you usually use a caret
"^&", in *nix you use "\&" (but that's deprecated in favor of
"&&"), in HTML you would say "%26". It's crazy to use a
reserved character, legal or not, in a file- or dir-name.

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Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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