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Portable Names

Use straight file and directory names, made up of printable ASCII characters, avoiding colons, slashes, backslashes, and other dangerous characters. Avoid deep directory nesting. Accounting for oldish System V machines, limit your file and directory names to 14 characters or less.

If you intend to have your tar archives to be read under MSDOS, you should not rely on case distinction for file names, and you might use the GNU doschk program for helping you further diagnosing illegal MSDOS names, which are even more limited than System V's.

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