TeX 1995 July/TeX CD-ROM July 1995 (Disc 1)(Walnut Creek)(1995).ISO/tex-k/tex-k-archive.past/1994.11.gz/1994.11/[e-mail]_Tue Nov 29 13:54:42 1994.msg

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Date: Tue, 29 Nov 1994 12:54:42 +0100
From: Andreas Schott <[e-mail]>
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Subject: Re:  virtex(1)
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We had a discussion about filenames end of July. The result was:

1. In TeX (Knuth) the decision was that almost everything, except
   a backslash, newline, blank or percent-sign are valid in
   filenames, thus not terminating a filename-token after \font,
   \input or \openin (Note: this includes {, } and $).

2. Furthermore the kpathsearch-library expands ~, ~uid, $foo and
   ${foo} like a shell would do (this is system-dependent).

3. You cannot influence the behaviour assigning different catcodes,
   \input does not care about catcodes.

As Pierre MacKay already said, although UNIX allows everything in
filenames (even newlines!) it is a bad idea to use it. Because
many programs including TeX make assumptions about separators.

Andreas Schott.
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