TEXTFI~2.TXT

Fun fact: C:\: is a perfectly valid NTFS path. Windows won’t let you create it, though, because Windows doesn’t even fully support the NTFS specification. That’s why you have to specify the windows_names option when mounting an NTFS filesystem on Linux.

C:\>TYPE POST_372.TXT
i have no idea why anyone would do that! makes it hard to live inside a terminal and the gui is too messy!
C:\>_

I remember hiding whacky wheels for DOS using ascii characters in the folder name. The professor tried to delete it using win 3.1… Hahahahaha… Good luck with that!

You complain about ASCII filenames but a few of the examples are obviously Unicode, namely using emoji, well outside of the ASCII character set. But since you’ve brought up Unicode file names, let me introduce you to bidirectional text!

If you use Hebrew or Arabic, some of your directories or files will have right-to-left text in them. This is a recipe for disaster.

If in English you’d have “C:\Users\Adam\Documents\Research\Paper.pdf”, which breaks down to:

1. C:\
2. Users\
3. Adam\
4. Documents\
5. Research\
6. Paper.pdf

In Hebrew you’d have: “C:\משתמשים\אדם\מסמכים\מחקר\מאמר.pdf”, which breaks down to:

1. C:\
2. משתמשים\
3. אדם\
4. מסמכים\
5. מחקר\
6. מאמר.pdf

The entire path goes backwards, and the “.pdf” extension is visually attached to the “Users” folder if the text is rendered naively. It’s insane. Fortunately many GUI shells nowadays separate each path item so they can’t get intermixed like this. Example:

But still, if you copy a path into plaintext, it will still visually look wrong, and there is literally nothing that anyone can do about it. This is the correct way to render this text.

Exact same issues occur in Arabic and the few other RTL languages usedin the world. It’s a massive pain.

Edit: oh, and on commandline on Windows, the required characters aren’t even available by default so you get this lovely thing

if you think this is bad, wait for the .🙏🥴❤️ TLDs