Brian Chadwick <brianchad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > As far as I am aware, and I have tested this, Windoze will not let you > make a filename that is like .emacs ... ie a leading period and no > further extension. > > .emacs wont work > .emacs.text will work ... > > so i think its a vaguery of windoze and I suppose samba is enforcing that. Actually, I think that it is more subtle than that, as your reply sparked some research on my part. I found: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247.aspx Noting: "Do not end a file or directory name with a trailing space or a period. Although the underlying file system may support such names, the operating system does not. You can start a name with a period (.)." However, on Wikipedia at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filename It is noted: "In Windows the space and the period are not allowed as the final character of a filename. The period is allowed as the first character, but certain Windows applications, such as Windows Explorer, forbid creating or renaming such files (despite this convention being used in Unix-like systems to describe hidden files and directories). Among workarounds are using different explorer applications or saving a file from an application with the desired name." To do some further testing on this, I used my wife's computer, which is running XP. Using Windows Explorer, I tried to create a .emacs file in her My Documents. Could not do it. However, I opened Notepad, typed a few letters and then went to "Save As", selected All Files as the file type, so that Notepad would not default to saving with a .txt extension. Sure enough, I created a .emacs file. I was pretty sure that I had a .emacs file on Windows when I was still using it some years ago. Just been long enough that I didn't recall some of the subtleties... So, to your point, arguably, SMB/CIFS seems to be replicating the Windows Explorer behavior, even when not using the GUI to copy files. Seems like this is arguably a bug in the implementation, since clearly the Windows file system supports filenames and folders with leading periods. It is just not clear to me if this is a bug in F8 or in RHEL or both. I have gone ahead and committed a bug against F8's Samba: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=427951 I'll have to talk to my SysAdmin and see if he will let me connect via NFS as an alternative in the mean time. Thanks, Marc
