This article traces Linux's transformation into one of the most popular mobile phone environments today. It was written by Jim Ready, founder and CTO of MontaVista -- and arguably one of the most important pioneers in the market for off-the-shelf commercial embedded operating systems. Enjoy...
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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