This book is intended as a sophomore level university text book. The coverage of subject material assues that the reader has a working knowledge of higher level languages in general and is familiar with a reasonable modern program development environment. The purpose of the book is to introduce those already familiar with programming to a more system-oriented language that provides the programmer with a greater degree of freedom (and therefore responsibility).
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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