File not found errors during CIFS copy to remote RHEL share

[Marc Schwartz]

Brian Chadwick <brianchad at westnet.com.au> writes:

> As far as I am aware, and I have tested this, Windoze will not let you
> make a filename that is like .emacs ... ie a leading period and no
> further extension.
>
> .emacs wont work
> .emacs.text will work ...
>
> so i think its a vaguery of windoze and I suppose samba is enforcing that.

Actually, I think that it is more subtle than that, as your reply
sparked some research on my part.

I found:

  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247.aspx

Noting:

"Do not end a file or directory name with a trailing space or a
period. Although the underlying file system may support such names, the
operating system does not. You can start a name with a period (.)."


However, on Wikipedia at: 

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filename

It is noted:

"In Windows the space and the period are not allowed as the final
character of a filename. The period is allowed as the first character,
but certain Windows applications, such as Windows Explorer, forbid
creating or renaming such files (despite this convention being used in
Unix-like systems to describe hidden files and directories). Among
workarounds are using different explorer applications or saving a file
from an application with the desired name."


To do some further testing on this, I used my wife's computer, which is
running XP.

Using Windows Explorer, I tried to create a .emacs file in her My
Documents. Could not do it.

However, I opened Notepad, typed a few letters and then went to "Save
As", selected All Files as the file type, so that Notepad would not
default to saving with a .txt extension. Sure enough, I created a .emacs
file.

I was pretty sure that I had a .emacs file on Windows when I was still
using it some years ago.  Just been long enough that I didn't recall
some of the subtleties...

So, to your point, arguably, SMB/CIFS seems to be replicating the
Windows Explorer behavior, even when not using the GUI to copy files.

Seems like this is arguably a bug in the implementation, since clearly
the Windows file system supports filenames and folders with leading
periods. It is just not clear to me if this is a bug in F8 or in RHEL or
both.

I have gone ahead and committed a bug against F8's Samba:

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=427951

I'll have to talk to my SysAdmin and see if he will let me connect via
NFS as an alternative in the mean time.

Thanks,

Marc