I'm downloading files of names like:

http://www.aaa.com/~john/foo-txt.htm

Now, when I do this in a browser (I use lynx (shell-account))
the default name to store it under is foo-txt.htm.

Years later, what I'll want to know is exactly where it came from, ie
I'd like the filename to depict the entire url.

Like this, perhaps?

http://www.aaa.com/~john/foo-txt.htm

Nope, because regardless of what the computer will
make of it, it'll confuse *me* -- not knowing whether
those slashes represent dir-separators within *my* computer,
or in some far-away (maybe long dead) server.

Hmmm. Maybe "---" for "/"?

What about ":"?

And what about "~"?

Plus other chars I've not thought of?

Making it even longer, if the *title* of the report in
the file is "10 easy editing tips", and I want that reflected
in the name too.

Hello David,

Just a thought: Trying to encode the path of the remote file into the
filename after downloading seems weird. Why not just re-create the
folder structure?

For example, if you download

http://www.aaa.com/~john/foo-txt.htm

then you would have the following file on your disk:

/home/david/my web downloads/www.aaa.com/~john/foo.txt

Isn't that what pretty much what `wget', or any other web downloader
tool would do?

David Combs wrote:

In article gnu.org>,
The Badger example.com> wrote:

Thanks for the suggestion

On Aug 15, 3:38 pm, dkco...@panix.com (David Combs) wrote:

David Combs wrote:

Xah gmail.com> wrote:

Actually unix systems allow pretty much every character except / and the
null character. Of course most shells require proper quoting of
characters /they/ assign a special meaning to, as do programming
languages. But that holds true for every OS and doesn't apply to the
GUI at all.

regards,
Nikolaj Schumacher

On Aug 24, 5:31 am, Nikolaj Schumacher wrote:

To say that unix allows much wider chars in file names is like saying
mud is the best medium for sculpture.

Unix file names, for much of its history up to perhaps mid 2000s,
effectively just allows alphanumerics plus hyphen “-” and underscore
“_”. As a contrast for comparison, Mac's file names often contain
punctuations such as “,$#!*()” and space, but also allows non-ascii
such as

On Sun, 24 Aug 2008 12:12:38 -0700 (PDT) Xah wrote:

On Aug 25, 1:13 pm, Nikolaj Schumacher wrote:

unix uses UFS.

if i recall correctly, the ext2 didn't become popular until mid 2000.

don't want to argue... you can read more about unix issues on my
site...

Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄

Nikolaj Schumacher wrote:

Xah gmail.com> wrote:

You should be more clear if you're talking about UNIX or unix. Neither
is limited to a single file system, though.

The oldest UNIX file system listed in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems was the
Version 6 FS, which allows "any byte except NUL and /" with a limit of
14 bytes in 1972.

UFS supports "any byte except NUL" with 255 bytes and (also according to
Wikipedia) was introduced in BSD 4.2 in 1983.

You're mistaken. But that's not relevant. The question is whether unix
is, by design, capable of handling characters outside the alphanumerical
range.