this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
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I've recently learned that in Linux, you can use emois in filenames. I died a ~~little~~ lot inside when I learned that.
On Linux file systems you can use any character except NULL, and / is a reserved character.
E.g. on ext-4 "All characters and character sequences permitted, except for NULL ('\0'), '/', and the special file names "." and ".." which are reserved for indicating (respectively) current and parent directories."
I once accidentally created a file with a newline character in it... it was pretty tricky to fix from command line.
Arrest this person
This is absolutely haram
it was on accident, habibi, I swear 😁. I messed up some cmake code for preprocessing .txt ascii sprites into constants and accidentally created this abomination
I once made a script to delete .o, .lib, and .so files from my huge dev folder to free up space on my home partition.
It did not go as planned.
O no, o no no no
This is why you shouldn't parse
lsoutput btw. UsefindandreadinsteadI actually did this a lot on classic Mac OS. Intentionally.
The reason was that you could put a carriage return as the first character of a file, and it would sort above everything else by name while otherwise being invisible. You just had to copy the carriage return from a text editor and then paste it into the rename field in the Finder.
Since OS X / macOS can still read classic Mac HFS+ volumes, you can indeed still have carriage returns in file names on modern Macs. I don't think you can create them on modern macOS, though. At least not in the Finder or with common Terminal commands.
I created a file with backspace in name, it was hard to understand why filename doesn't match
Did you not just use tab? That's the usual method of dealing with weird characters in filenames that I've found
This was quite a while ago now, but I don't think my shell escaped the tab complete properly, I remember it just printing a literal newline and evaluating it as a second command. I think there was other unicode in there too, otherwise I would have just typed it out. I had to do something with null terminated output and piping it in to
mv, but I can't remember what exactly.Too bad when there's multiple files starting with and consisting mostly of e.g. kanji (when on a Latin keyboard).
With the right shell, you can just press tab multiple times to cycle through the possible completions.
I don't conduct interviews very often, but when I do, one of my questions is always about interacting with files that have special characters in the filename.
So ... is allowed, or all whitespace, or Zalgo text.
I mean, on the one hand, I guess why be restrictive, but on the other I feel like requiring something that looks like language somehow might be a good idea to avoid edge cases and attacks.
You can have new lines in your file names. YSAP has a good video/playlist about how to deal with these and many more.
could you have
..? I assume most terminals would just spell out.\x200b.?Or use a hair space so it looks almost the same. Or .. but you've added the right-to-left unicode character. I'm guessing there's something that looks a lot like a period, too.
If ext4 doesn't include restrictions terminals probably should.
In filenames? AMATEURS! Use obscure Unicode in your passphrases for maximum security. Ctrl-Shift-U, enter arbitrary code point, bam! 🦊 Works even better with a Compose key and a nice, chonky
.XComposefile to throw some gr∑∑k letters around, for instance, like some confused script kiddie. :)On topic: There are multiple variants of spaces in Unicode. You're welcome, and now go and create something utterly deranged with that information.
I already deal far too much with trying to handle dumb fucking typos in employee data, and trying to turn human names into valid email addresses.
The first time I encounter something like this there will be a body. It will not be found.
иnteresting_idéa_lål.ㅅㅇ
Some grSSk letters?
yes, grSSk letters
This needs more upvotes. Chaos gods smile at you, and I thank you
unix filenames are just string of bytes, the operating system does not interpret it in anyway. this is a much saner approach compared to Windows where language settings can change file system behavior.
*in any_way. ;)
I'm just gonna pretend I didn't hear that.
⏰️.🪵
ChatGPT is taking notes
10 seconds of googling indicates this is true for Windows and Mac as well. I haven't looked specifically, but I'd be a little surprised if it wasn't true for Android and iOS as well.
But really, why would they add rules to prevent people from using certain unicode codepoints in filenames? Should they disallow Klingon as well? Kanji? Of course not. Emojis are codepoints just like U+0061 is.
Of course there are good reasons to disallow things like newlines and forward slashes in Linux filenames, but what specifically would even be the argument for preventing emojis?
Lol, I think that's how I learned it was possible, too.
yt-dlpuses the title as the filename, and all of the emojis came along with it. Was trying to rename them from terminal, but couldn't do much when half the filenames started with the fire emoji lol.It's all just Unicode
You can have emoji as your WiFi network name too
Kinda interesting to see what older devices do when faced with such a network
What about an emoji only wifi password?
Same for Windows (11): I just renamed a file to an apple emoji
I think that may be possible for every filesystem supporting UTF-8 encoding.
You can use emojis for variable names in swift code.
I have been using emoji in macOS for many years. It can be very useful to tag files.