On Tue, Feb 06, 2018 at 10:19:25PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote: > > Do you happen to know what was the reason somebody way back in time > > decided to not consider the epoch in the filenames? > > My understanding is that it would have caused some kind of problems for > common operations at the time involving things like tar, but I'm afraid > I forget the details. Ian Jackson would probably know ... tar will treat a filename with : in it as a command to connect to a remote machine via rsh and execute /etc/rmt remotely: ftp://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/Manuals/tar/html_node/tar_127.html The git repo shows that GNU tar had --force-local in 1994 (f_force_local): http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/tar.git/commit/?id=d3fdd8259b1dd0e5ec05d1540b10d2deba7cc864 Perhaps not using colons in filenames directly comes from not wanting to require --force-local on every single tar invocation for decades to come? Thanks
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature