Legal characters for DOS filenames / Enviroment Variables

[somerandomhash]

Following on from http://ketarin.canneverbe.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=93 I thought it would be helpful to post some handy info regarding 8.3 file names (as it will probably help others)

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8.3_filename

 

# Upper case letters A–Z (see lower case letters below) you CAN use them

# Numbers 0–9

# Space (though trailing spaces in either the base name or the extension are considered to be padding and not a part of the filename, also filenames with spaces in them could not be used on the DOS command line because it lacked a suitable escaping system)

#

! # $ % & ' ( ) - @ ^ _ ` { } ~

# (FAT-32 only)

+ , . ; = [ ]

# Values 128–255

 

This excludes the following ASCII characters:

" * / : < > ? \ |

 

Windows/MSDOS has no shell escape character

 

Lower case letters a–z stored as A–Z on FAT-12/16

 

Some handy links

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environment_variable#Examples_of_DOS_environment_variables

 

http://mirror.href.com/thestarman/DOS/DOS7INT.htm

Edited February 12, 2009 by somerandomhash

[CybTekSol]

I cut my teeth on the DOS command line many many years ago... it never hurts to refresh my memory! Thanks somerandomhash.