On 9/3/07, Mark Mielke <mark@mark.mielke.cc> wrote:
> Tom Lane wrote:
> > Also, ____ says that Windows throws an error for ":" in the filename,
> > which means we needn't.
> Windows doesn't fail - but it can do odd things. For example, try:
>
> C:\> echo hi >foo:bar
>
> If one then checks the directory, one finds a "foo".
: is used for naming streams and attribute types in NTFS filenames.
It's not very well-known functionality and tends to confuse people,
but I'm not aware of any situation where it'd be a problem for read
access. (Creation is not a security risk in the technical sense, but
as most administrators aren't aware of alternate data streams and the
shell does not expose them, it's effectively hidden data.)
If any of you are familiar with MacOS HFS resource forks, NTFS
basically supports an arbitrary number of named forks. A file is
collection of one or more data streams, the single unnamed stream
being default.