This HOWTO written by Juan-Mariano de Goyeneche tries to cover most aspects related to multicast over TCP/IP networks. So, a lot of information within it is not Linux-specific (just in case you don't use GNU/Linux... yet). Multicast is currently an active area of research and, at the time of writing, many of the "standards" are merely drafts. Keep it in mind while reading the lines that follow.
Traditionally, Unix/Linux/POSIX filenames can be almost any sequence of bytes, and their meaning is unassigned. The only real rules are that "/" is always the directory separator, and that filenames can't contain byte 0 (because this is the terminator). Although this is flexible, this creates many unnecessary problems. In particular, this lack of limitations makes it unnecessarily difficult to write correct programs (enabling many security flaws), makes it impossible to consistently and accurately display filenames, causes portability problems, and confuses users. more ....
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