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I have a drive which is formatted EXT4 with GUID partition table. I was wondering if the commas and dots are accepted in directory and file names. I have several ebooks and I would like to store them named like so:

John Doe, Dr. - Title of Book (Year).epub
Rachel Smith, Phd. - Title of Book (Year).epub
Andrew Thomas - Title of Book, The (Year).epub

I won't access them via command-line, only GUI file managers, so escaping the whitespace is not something I worry about.

Zoltan King
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  • I strongly urge you not to do this. Commas and dots are absolutely fine, they won't cause any issues, but spaces make your life more complicated for very little benefit and so do the parentheses. At least remove the spaces and save as John_Doe,_Dr._-_Title_of_Book_(Year).epub. – terdon Apr 29 '22 at 15:15
  • why don't you try creating a folder and a file that contain commas and dots in names? – jsotola Apr 29 '22 at 15:22

1 Answers1

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Yes. Commas and dots are fine.

Actually, any character apart from / and NULs (ASCII zero) is acceptable as part of a filename. You would have to escape "difficult" character, but that is the extent of it.

Kusalananda
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White Owl
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    Note that the filesystem that is being used may have further restrictions. – Kusalananda Apr 29 '22 at 12:09
  • That's a good point @Kusalananda. I'm using EXT4 and whatever filesystem I will move in the future that will be UNIX-like as well such as BTRFS, XFS, etc.. Windows NTFS is excluded. If EXT4 supports all these characters I doubt anything newer that will be made in future won't support them. – Zoltan King Apr 29 '22 at 12:25