[ rockbox-Bugs-782248 ] Should prevent saving "filename."

Bugs item #782248, was opened at 2003-08-03 09:59
Message generated for change (Comment added) made by combthins
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Category: User Interface
Group: None
Status: Open
Resolution: None
Priority: 5
Submitted By: Barry McIntosh (combthins)
Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Summary: Should prevent saving "filename."

Initial Comment:
If you save a filename ending in "." the file is impossible 
to remove, rename or open using Windows.  For example 
on General Settings menu, save settings to "config00."

The only way I have found to remove the file is using 
the ROCKbox ON-PLAY menu.  Windows lists the file but 
can't do anything with it.  cygwin "ls" sometimes lists it, 
depending what options you give it, but can't remove or 
rename it.

I assume that "filename." is an illegal filename as far as 
FAT is concerned, so we should prevent ROCKbox from 
creating such files.

Also, if we allow the user to create files called "." or ".." 
that might cause even bigger problems. I haven't tried it.

Found on Player built from tarball rockbox-daily-
20030801.

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>Comment By: Barry McIntosh (combthins)
Date: 2003-12-28 22:57

Message:
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>From the FAT32 File System Specification (page 29):

"Leading and embedded periods are allowed in a name and are 
stored in the long name.  Trailing periods are ignored."

I think this is a bit ambiguous, but I suspect what they mean 
is that trailing periods should be ignored (stripped) on write, 
and not stored as part of the long filename.  It seems that 
Windows then never expects a trailing period when reading a 
filename.  So ".rockbox" is a legal FAT32 name, even if you 
have to use a command line rather than Windows Explorer to 
create it, while "rockbox." is not legal.  At any rate, it strongly 
suggests that a dot right at the end might be more 
problematic than one at the start or in the middle of the name. 
 If Linux or rockbox or any other operating system is more 
tolerant of badly created names than Windows, that's fine by 
me, but no operating system should knowingly allow badly 
formed names to be created.

So my suggestion is simply that Rockbox should prevent 
creation of file names with trailing dots, which is what I think 
the FAT32 spec calls for.

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Comment By: Mike Holden (mikeholden)
Date: 2003-12-28 19:07

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I'm sure that "filename." is a valid FAT filename, in the
same way that ".rockbox" is valid as a folder name.

The problem is actually that Windows is too "stupid" to
allow you to create these filenames, hence we need to use
DOS (or a decent O/S like Linux) to create the directory
under Windows.

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Comment By: Barry McIntosh (combthins)
Date: 2003-12-28 17:13

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Moormaster, I can't remember if I tried using scandisk to 
recover the file, but that is beside the point.  The issue is that 
such filenames are illegal in FAT, and Rockbox should aim to 
prevent users doing things to the filesystem which are illegal 
(just as Windows, Linux and any other operating system 
should).  Using Scandisk or some other Windows utility might 
be a workaround, but it would be much better to have Rockbox 
avoid creating the illegal filename in the first place.

CombThins

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Comment By: Andre Herbst (moormaster)
Date: 2003-12-22 22:53

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Can't Scandisk repair those files? I cannot believe that is 
really impossible to delete broken files in Windows. This has to 
be a feature of an operating system.

have you tried to rename these files in a console? Sometimes 
it works there to access files which Windows cannot handle.

(Windows 98 had the bug that every file with an ASCII 255-
character in the filename was not accessible by any program. 
You could rename any file in the MSDOS-Command with this 
character and you could rename it back there)

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