Re: Valid characters on one o/s are invalid on another

["Juan M. Courcoul" <courcoul () campus qro itesm mx>]

FWIW, I came upon a similar behavior on MacOS 9.0.4 recently.

Needing to back up some files from my trusty iBook, I used a Sony
Spressa CD-RW unit together with the bundled Discribe 2.9 software
(actually made by CharisMac Engineering) to lay down the first session,
but didn't 'close' the CD just yet. Since I needed to back up more files
in the following days, I laid down two additional sessions, each of
which is viewed by the OS as a new volume. In other words, when the CD
is mounted, either on the Spressa or on the internal CD reader, three
different volume icons will appear on the desktop, corresponding to the
three different sessions burned on the CD, all of which were created
from files stored on the HD, in standard Mac HFS format with standard
MacOS file naming rules.

All fine and dandy, until I tried to open and browse any of the session
volumes. At first pop, the window opens and the files and folders appear
in Icon view, since the CD was burned that way. However, if you try to
access any file or folder in any way, be it just to do a Get Info on it,
to run it or to open it via its corresponding application, the icon
disappears, never to be seen again until you close the volume window and
reopen, at which time this behavior repeats itself. However, if you
switch to List view, all files and folders are visible and do not
disappear when accessed.

I previously had a similar experience with a ISO-format CD, but had
written it off as some sort of interaction between the non-native ISO
format and the OS; however, it returned and bit me back with a native
HFS volume. Revenge of the graphical interfaces ?

J. Courcoul

"Kayne Ian (Softlab)" wrote:
> Hey all,
>         This recent thread about antivirus scanners & DOS archives got me
> thinking. Years ago (before *zip introduced the non-absolute paths option),
> it was possible to create a zip archive with some files in, hex edit the
> archive and change the locations of some of these files, thus making it
> extremely easy to transparently replace files on a system that the archive
> is extracted on. This used to be a particularly nasty trick on amiga bbs's -
> the amiga version of zip was pretty pathetic to say the least. Anyway, this
> got me wondering about seeing whether this was still possible (albeit in a
> different manner). After playing around, I noticed something strange.
>
>         We all know Windows (well the FS really) doesn't allow certain ascii
> characters to be used for filenames - ?, " etc... But, other o/s's
> filesystems do - in this case Amiga O/S 3.0 & the FFS (fast file system).
> So, when I got a CD on the amiga containing some files with legal characters
> under workbench but illegal under windows, then tried to access the CD on a
> windows machine (specifically the badly named files), some dodgy behaviour
> happened. Files started "dissapearing" from the CD etc... Didn't go much
> further than this...
>
>         Just wondering if anyone else has any thoughts/opinions on this ...
> Is it even any use or worth looking into?