Subj : Re: Beautiful hacks
To   : Spectre
From : tenser
Date : Thu Nov 02 2023 09:59:46


On 26 Oct 2023 at 06:28p, Spectre pondered and said...
 
 Sp>  BW>  > No, that character displays as a space.
 Sp> 
 Sp> The old Apple DOS3.x so there was 3.2 3.2.1, and 3.3 would all allow you
 Sp> to use any ctl characters as filenames.  You could use a name like hello
 Sp> and then pop in 5 x ctl-j and the name would actually disappear from the
 Sp> catalog.  There were a number of variations on this, different control
 Sp> characters also having cursor control.

Steve Bourne used to keep a directory of zero-byte files that
were given names according to each representable 8-bit byte in
his account at Bell Labs.  This apparently was famous for
tripping up various naive scripts and tools that walked across
the filesystem.

I always thought that was a clever hack.

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