rsync - Mar 2003 - fudging filename characters

There are a couple of bug reports on the Debian rsync package about
problems with a recipient filesystem that can't cope with all possible
unix filenames.  Notably filenames with question marks are a problem...
I guess that people are trying to backup systems to a SMB share which
presumably is then regularly backupped to tape. This basically sounds
like a reasonable thing to do :-)

Would there be much opposition to an option to mangle filenames if
necessary? In its most trivial form, all characters besides a-zA-z0-9_.-
would be mapped to e.g. _ . Of course, restoring these would be a lot of
work, but at least the rsync transfer would work.

In a later incarnation there might be different mappings, e.g. to a
HTTP-like %XX notation (so space becomes %20, question mark becomes %3F,
% becomes %25, etc.).  The argument to the option could determine the
mapping.


Comments? Suggestions?  What should the option be called?


Paul Slootman

Paul Slootman <paul@debian.org> wrote:
>There are a couple of bug reports on the Debian rsync package about
>problems with a recipient filesystem that can't cope with all possible
>unix filenames.  Notably filenames with question marks are a problem...
>I guess that people are trying to backup systems to a SMB share which
>presumably is then regularly backupped to tape. This basically sounds
>like a reasonable thing to do :-)
>
>Would there be much opposition to an option to mangle filenames if
>necessary? In its most trivial form, all characters besides a-zA-z0-9_.-
>would be mapped to e.g. _ . Of course, restoring these would be a lot of
>work, but at least the rsync transfer would work.
Seems to me that rsync is only one of dozens of utilities that is affected by 
such restrictions.  I object to trying to fix this in rsync.  Seems to me that 
people could write a shell script that would copy & rename the files or 
directories to some other location, and rsync from there. Or they could fix up 
their file names, or complain to their vendors.  (I must admit that I work for a
company that has a product whose file system does not permit question mark, 
number sign, percent sign, or several other characters to appear in file names. 
But I still don't support changing rsync or any other command to deal with 
this).

Thanks
PG
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Paul Green, Senior Technical Consultant, Stratus Technologies.
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