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Windows/Cygwin/MacOSX import (was RE: python-dev summary, 2001-02-01

Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk qrczak at knm.org.pl
Mon Feb 19 15:59:33 EST 2001 
Fri, 16 Feb 2001 18:06:23 -0500, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> pisze:

> One of the hassles with Win9X is that Windows Explorer displays, I believe,
> some files differently from how they are stored.

And stores files differently than was asked to. For example when
you try to create a directory called Spam, it will create SPAM and
display it as Spam. And when asked to create SPAM, it will create it
but display Spam. It behaves correctly when the name has more than
8 characters or when a character outside ASCII is used.

This is Win95 - I don't know if they fixed this in later versions.

Worse: using the Explorer you can create a filename with some non-ASCII
characters (e.g. <<French quotes>> or bullet), which will be silently
converted to other characters, perhaps different in long and short
names (in these cases: '<<' and '>>' character pairs, and '\7' -
a control character which displays as bullet in DOS). Details depend
on the default codepages (the above is for CP-1250 and CP-852). This
can make the file inaccessible under either Windows or DOS or both
(because the converted character is sometimes not legal in a filename,
but the filename was checked for correctness before conversion). You
can't delete or rename such file from either Windows or DOS or both,
until you repair the filesystem. Scandisk is not always able to do it.

not-using-Windows-anymore-ly y'rs
-- 
 __("<  Marcin Kowalczyk * qrczak at knm.org.pl http://qrczak.ids.net.pl/
 \__/
  ^^                      SYGNATURA ZASTĘPCZA
QRCZAK
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