backslash

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, Jun 25, 2008, Jorge Almeida wrote:
> This may look a somewhat strange question, but anyway: can I be
> reasonably sure that no file belonging to a [sane] package ever has a
> backslash in its path?

Presuming that the backslash you are talking about is ``\'', not
what Windows users may think of a backslash, ``/'', the backslash
is not an illegal character in a path, but I would be extremely
surprised to find any except, perhaps, is something a cracker was
attempting to hide.

> In case you're wondering, I want to cook up a setup to find which
> package owns a file (the gentoo way is really slow): a directory is
> populated with symlinks, each corresponding to a file; the target is the
> package owning the file; of course, the symlink name can't have a slash,
> hence the question...

I don't know about gentoo/debian systems, but I would suspect
that there would be a command similar to ``rpm -qf filename''
that would reveal the package name.  At least in the rpm world
this seems to work regardless of symlinks.

Bill
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