I'm not sure if this belongs here to elsewhere, but I'm getting crazy with users who create file names with all sort of special characters in it. While I hope that backup scripts will handle most (I don't dare to write "all") files, it's really annoying that any operation in the shell sooner or later gets terribly complicated for handling spaces, brackets etc.

So the problem is: how to prevent the creation of bad file names? And where?
Is there a possibility to define rules, e.g. to explicitly allow only what would survive e.g. a

Code: Select all

tr -c "[A-Z][a-z][0-9].-:_@" "_"

and apply that to all file dialogs?

Since the creation of bad files is most likely done by users who don't use a shell at all, I think that the best way would be to define filter rules in GUI I/O routines, and to define them at some central place (not as a user option). In this case, adding a filter to KDE file saving dialogs would probably solve 90% of these issues for me.

I guess adding such rules on a lower level (if possible at all) may cause trouble in the presence of such files. E.g. unless I modify all such files to clean names before, I can't forbid their presence on system level because it would break the possibility to make backups...or even to rename them

The other option is probably to search for such files with cron and spam the users who own them?

Any ideas?

Unless you make the system language US ASCII, I don't think what you want is possible. I suspect the problem is not users creating files with these special characters but users importing files from operating systems which do not use Unicode or, as happened to me recently, importing them from a website that uses Latin-1.

Are all the users using Unicode on all their desktops? If not, that could be one cause of incompatibility.