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    Which characters are allowed or disallowed depends on the filesystem in use. Commented Oct 1, 2012 at 2:51
  • @JimParis Do you have an example of a *nix filesystem that doesn't allow characters other than \0 and /? Commented Oct 1, 2012 at 4:43
  • Also interesting in this context: Understanding Unix file name encoding Commented Oct 1, 2012 at 7:07
  • @JimParis you were right. Commented Oct 1, 2012 at 13:27
  • 1
    "I'm writing a shell script that requires the user to type a file name and I would like to make sure the name doesn't have any invalid characters. Is there a list somewhere?" Just try to create the file, and fail cleanly and tell them if it didn't work. There are other reasons file creation could fail (creating under a nonexistent directory, for example), and trying to check for all of them in advance just opens you to a race condition. Commented Oct 1, 2012 at 15:14