Anyone who has ever worked in a networked environment running different operating systems using different filesystems knows the frustration of trying to get every computer to see the data on every other computer. Even on my multi-boot test computer, NT can't see the data on my FAT32 partition, Windows 98 can't see the data on my NTFS partition, DOS can't see data on either partition -- and these operating systems are all installed on the same hard drive. more...
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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