$ Dollar Sign in File Name Redux
In
Alin Constantin's response to David Taylor's question on 5 October 05, he states 'There were some problems having files or folders with '$' character part of the name."
What exactly were those problems? We already have files with '$' in the name (originally added with the SourceSafe 5.0/6.0 client). What issues might this raise?
Because we have product requirements for certain files with '$', we keep an old copy of SourceSafe 6.0 around to add them when necessary.
tick...tick...tick...tick...tick...
I don't remember all the bad cases, but you could have files containing $ in VS projects that were listed in PendingCheckinsWindow but could not be checked in into VSS, or get weird error messages or unspecified errors when trying to add these files to VSS. You could also try to rename a folder so the new name would contain $, and this generated lots of "Project not found errors", appeared to have failed but caused database corruption, etc.
The funniest bug was that you could create a hierarchy of folder names named $, like $/$/$/$...., that you could expand at infinite; search and tree expansion with Num* would hang VSS; analyze would not fix the problem, so the only option was to call PSS. We found at least 2 ways of creating this screwed tree.
Anyway, the decision was that $ and % were disabled as part of a name. The changes were made in 2002 during the Everett security push, so I'm not sure whether there weren't some security issues involved, too.
Alin
