PBS Task history creating "bad" files at times

[fabian]

so it was just Nextcloud complaining about the backslash after all. this is unfortunate, but syncing PBS task logs to Windows(-compatible) systems is not really something we care about

 

[BloodyIron]

so it was just Nextcloud complaining about the backslash after all. this is unfortunate, but syncing PBS task logs to Windows(-compatible) systems is not really something we care about

There is zero Windows anything involved. I don't know why you think there is.

 

[fabian]

NextCloud doesn't allow syncing of files with "\" in their name. the reason is that Windows cannot handle them

 

[BloodyIron]

NextCloud doesn't allow syncing of files with "\" in their name. the reason is that Windows cannot handle them

That is irrelevant, there is _zero_ Windows involved. My desktop isn't Windows, it's Linux, same for the nextCloud server (Linux). I uploaded via the webGUI, which is my browser. Where do you think Windows comes into play at all here? Because there's zero Windows involved.

 

[Dunuin]

That is irrelevant, there is _zero_ Windows involved. My desktop isn't Windows, it's Linux, same for the nextCloud server (Linux). I uploaded via the webGUI, which is my browser. Where do you think Windows comes into play at all here? Because there's zero Windows involved.

There hasn`t to be any Windows involved. What fabian meant was that if the Nextcloud developers code it to be compatible with Windows it won't work with "\" no matter if you are using Linux, Mac or whatever, as it otherwise wouldn't sync with people using Windows.

 

[fabian]

yes. NextCloud doesn't allow back slashes in the file name. it also doesn't allow regular slashes for the same reason - both are used as path separators on one or the other OS, and since they want to support clients across the board, they forbid both variants. if you want improved compat with Windows client systems, you can also forbid other characters that are a problem on Windows (such as ':') - but that is optional (don't ask me why, I didn't write NextCloud ). you don't need to run Windows anywhere for "\" to be forbidden in Nextcloud - they always are.

 

[RolandK]

to be honest, why is pbs using special chars like \ , : or ! at all in filenames ?

i have rarely seen so weird file naming and it's really making users life hard when it comes to script processing, i'm sure there are quite some people pulling their hair out on this.

let's give an example

# find . |grep 000013C3|while read file;do echo $file;ls -la "$file";done

./UPID:pbs01:003DF94A:25FC9635:000013C3:6950546E:backup:dsx2dpvex2dcluster1x3avm-187:pbsbackup_pve-cluster1@pbs:

ls: cannot access './UPID:pbs01:003DF94A:25FC9635:000013C3:6950546E:backup:dsx2dpvex2dcluster1x3avm-187:pbsbackup_pve-cluster1@pbs:': No such file or directory

 

[fabian]

because it's a Linux based piece of software, and Linux doesn't care about such things (paths are sequences of bytes). shell handling does require extra attention, that's why tools like find and xargs have special modes:

$ find . -iname "*001D9C7A*" -print0 | xargs -0 ls -lha
-rw-r--r-- 1 backup backup 325 Sep  5 13:28 './7A/UPID:yuna:00083F6E:001D9C7A:00000000:68BAC93E:benchmark:tank\x3ahost-benchmark:test@pbs:'
-rw-r--r-- 1 backup backup 36K Sep  5 14:00  ./7A/UPID:yuna:00083F6E:001D9C7A:00000001:68BAD0C0:prunejob:tank:root@pam:

you will also notice that your shell (hopefully ) escapes the back slash when tab completing, so things like

$ ls -lha 7A/UPID:yuna:00083F6E:001D9C7A:0000000<tab>
UPID:yuna:00083F6E:001D9C7A:00000000:68BAC93E:benchmark:tank\\x3ahost-benchmark:test@pbs:  UPID:yuna:00083F6E:001D9C7A:00000001:68BAD0C0:prunejob:tank:root@pam:

will also work and do the right thing. also note how the "ls" output in the first snippet quotes the path, so that the backslash has no effect when copying.

systemd has the same issue (and a similar solution) -> unit filenames cannot contain /, so it's encoded as -, which in turn means - needs to be escaped, which uses \x2d, which works just fine. (they do escape a few more things)