Points of Interest

I always liked the discrepancies between the actual filesystem as seen in a shell window and the GUI on the Mac. For a current software project, I needed to experiment with folder names containing colons: »:«. This is a valid character on Un*x like machines. On the Mac however, it is not possible to create a folder called »:::« – at least via the GUI. But it is of course using a shell. The result, however, is rather amusing :) :

For those who are not familiar with shell commands I’d like to provide a little explanation:

• Create a folder named »:::«
• Use »ls« to check whether it went well. Looks fine.
• Check the folder via the finder. It’s name now reads as »///«. WTF?!?



• So try to create a folder named »///«. Ah, it’s a directory?!? Heck!
• Try to create a folder named »:::« again. Doh. File exists. Well…
• Try to remove the folder named »///«. Is a directory. Hm. Thanks for the info.
• Try to remove the folder named »:::«. Ah, it actually disappears, in the GUI as well as the shell.

Well, let’s try a folder containing german umlauts. »äöüÄÖÜß« seems to be an interesting approach :) :

While typing the 7 umlauts, the shell immediately expanded it (I did not further investigate if it was unicode or anything else). While the folder does appear correctly in the Finder, »ls« does not show the expected result:

Weird. That’s one of those famous “Don’t try at home” experiments, I guess ;-) .

This entry was posted on Friday, January 23rd, 2009 at 0:17 and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.