Re: OT but somewhat relevant: & in file names

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

Robert Holmgren wrote:
> 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.
Thanks, Carl had already alerted me to the use of ^. And
your grammar is usually OK. I meant that I should like to
find a site where I could relevantly ask this kind of
question (and not be cluttering the Xy list with OT posts),
but every one I've looked at drove me crazy with childish
misspellings, disuse of the shift key, and a total lack of
punctuation.
And & wasn't reserved for years. Why do they have to keep
changing things? I suppose I can use ac or et, but that's 2
characters to the ampersand's one, and I try to keep to the
8.3 rule.

--
Patricia M. Godfrey
priscamg@xxxxxxxx