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5.3: Conventions regarding transmission of file names

In most contexts, `/' is used to separate directory and file names in filenames, and any use of other conventions (for example, that the user might type on the command line) is converted to that form. The only exceptions might be a few cases in which the server provides a magic cookie which the client then repeats verbatim, but as the server has not yet been ported beyond unix, the two rules provide the same answer (and what to do if future server ports are operating on a repository like e:/foo or CVS_ROOT:[FOO.BAR] has not been carefully thought out).

Characters outside the invariant ISO 646 character set should be avoided in filenames. This restriction may need to be relaxed to allow for characters such as `[' and `]' (see above about non-unix servers); this has not been carefully considered (and currently implementations probably use whatever character sets that the operating systems they are running on allow, and/or that users specify). Of course the most portable practice is to restrict oneself further, to the POSIX portable filename character set as specified in POSIX.1.

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