Forbidden filenames

Submitted by Alexis Wilke on Sat, 03/09/2013 - 06:37

The packager forbids a certain number of filesnames to ensure that your packages can be installed under MS-Windows and under a Unix system (Linux/Ubuntu).

These names are reserved under MS-Windows and thus are not allowed anywhere in your packages. There are no command line options to remove this limitation.

The current list of filenames that the packager does not accept include:

Namespaces

Filenames that start with \\.\<name>... represent a namespace. For example you can access your devices via this naming convention. These paths are completely forbidden in the packager.

Reserved Names (Legacy)

Older versions of MS-Windows made use of a limited number of filenames to allow applications to access devices. These are:

  • aux
  • com1, com2, com3, com4, com5, com6, com7, com8, com9
  • con
  • lpt1,lpt2, lpt3, lpt4, lpt5,lpt6, lpt7, lpt8, lpt9
  • nul
  • prn

These are also not allowed as package names even though a package filename would be fine (i.e. prn_1.2.3_win32.deb) once installed we create a directory named after the package ("prn" in this case) and that would not be allowed.

Package Names

The packager further forbids two names as package names: tmp and core. These two directories are used internally and as such cannot be allowed for your use.