alt Hacker News> Here’s the alphabet, in encoding order:
> ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789!#$%&'()+,-;=@[]^_`{}~
Yeah I definitely don't want any of those last ~22 characters in file names if I need to do anything with them from a shell
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Moreover, I'd be nervous about the fact that filenames on Windows tend to be case insensitive.
Even just "-" in a filename is problematic, since you can name actual files with "--" at the beginning, and the name could match a switch.
Yeah, I'm sympathetic to their desire for compression and efficiency but base64URL is way more shell-friendly.
I quite like base58 for human-presented identifiers also. I tend to use it instead of hex for having ~8-16 character IDs of things.
Same! Although I still have muscle-memory replacing spaces with _ or - when creating/saving files on any OS. Hasn't done me wrong lo these past 40 years. As for the others tailing the ASCII, no thanks.
I learned, and thought everyone else learned, that the safe characters for POSIX filenames are:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789_-
Authoritative source: POSIX.1-2024 standard, sec. 3.265 Portable Filename Character Set
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/basedefs/V1...
If I'm choosing a filename, it's lowercase alphanumeric plus underscore. Usually not even the underscore.
What you don’t want a file named `reboot`?
100% this
(Also for anything that needs to work on a shell script or whatever)
I roll my eyes every time some "super secure secret generator" gives me a password with &^%#$ that I need to use on a shell script. Thanks for making my life harder I guess
"oh but you just need to escape them" Yes please be my guest trying to deal with character escape whack-a-mole
I don’t see how they’re any worse than spaces in file names, which is an edge case you need to cater for already anyway.