Subject: Ftp-WG: MLST "comment" fact

From: Paul Hethmon <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Jan 1999 20:30:22 -0500

** Reply to note from FTPEXT Working Group <[email-masked]> Mon, 18 Jan 1999 01:51:52 -0500

> I retrieved the latest -05 draft and I hope to have some modifications 
> completed to both client and server for further testing.  A quick question 
> regarding the symbolic link type:  I had been wondering how to include the 
> "linked to" portion of the symbolic link in the data and I noticed how you 
> have it embedded after the OS.unix=slink portion.  That seems reasonable, 
> but how should we handle the case where the destination contains a 
> semi-colon or space character?  We may need to provide for an escape 
> character to be able to embed a space or semi-colon.

My personal preference would be to leave that to the server to escape it. Don't
make it part of the protocol to have to scan every fact line for escape
sequences. None of the facts defined in the draft require spaces or semi-colons
to work. So any fact which is later defined which needs to use spaces or
semi-colons should also specify the escape mechanism for them which works
withing the no-space and no-semi-colon limits. Perhaps using hex notation.

Paul

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Paul Hethmon                                         [email-masked]
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