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Interesting thing

Sorry, another Mac post. Please skip over this if you’re not interested – things will return to a normal level once the novelty has worn off, I promise. 🙂

On OS X, make a file. Doesn’t matter what, just type some random stuff into TextEdit and save it as test.rtf in your home folder. Now load the terminal up:

$ mv test.rtf test:file.rtf

Now look in the Finder. It will be called test/file.rtf. But that’s not what we called it!!

HFS+ (the filesystem) uses colons (:) as directory separators, but Unix uses the forward slash (/). The Unix underneath OS X can’t handle a file with a / in the name, but HFS+ can’t handle a file with a : in the name.

So Mac OS X swaps them around when necessary.

Clever, huh?

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2 Comments

  1. Chris wrote:

    Speaking of, there is no way to fake a / in a file name? I’m trying to create a blog on an install of WordPress Mu located at domain.tld/ so it’ll be located at domain.tld/subdir/blog/ and because I can’t use slashes, it freaks out. MediaWiki does it though…

    Thursday, March 1, 2007 at 01:39 | Permalink |
  2. Peter wrote:

    mod_rewrite?

    Sorry, I’m really not sure.

    Sunday, March 4, 2007 at 19:33 | Permalink |

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