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Our AIX servers provide a shared directory via Samba to multiple
Win98/XP desktops on our internal network. These PC access the shared
directory as a logical drive and then they make their own directory(s)
and save many of their files there. This has worked well for many
years.

However, these users are now creating directories and files with the
windows allowable file names that include embedded spaces and even
single and double quote characters.

When we try to backup our system including the shared directory and
all its recursive directories the AIX backup command is coughing at
these files that include these characters.

When creating our list of files used to drive the backup we have tried
wrapping the filenames in double quotes but then ALL the files are
being rejected by the backup command with the error "Trouble accessing
file ......". My guess is that the backup command is looking for a
file with the " characters as an actual part of the filename.

Has anyone come up across this issue before?

Any ideas and/or suggestions as to how we can represent the filenames
to backup will use them?

All suggestions appreciated.

Bob

Dear Bob,

Actually, what is your backup command or script?
Please note that isn't 100% rezolved if you just put
quotes arround filenames.

R.Mariotti(at)FinancialDataCorp.com (Bob Mariotti) wrote:

> Our AIX servers provide a shared directory via Samba to multiple
> Win98/XP desktops on our internal network. These PC access the shared
> directory as a logical drive and then they make their own directory(s)
> and save many of their files there. This has worked well for many
> years.
>
> However, these users are now creating directories and files with the
> windows allowable file names that include embedded spaces and even
> single and double quote characters.
>
> When we try to backup our system including the shared directory and
> all its recursive directories the AIX backup command is coughing at
> these files that include these characters.
>
> When creating our list of files used to drive the backup we have tried
> wrapping the filenames in double quotes but then ALL the files are
> being rejected by the backup command with the error "Trouble accessing
> file ......". My guess is that the backup command is looking for a
> file with the " characters as an actual part of the filename.
>
> Has anyone come up across this issue before?
>
> Any ideas and/or suggestions as to how we can represent the filenames
> to backup will use them?
>
> All suggestions appreciated.
>
> Bob

kind regards,
--
Claudiu Costin, claudiuc@kde.org
Linux-KDE Romania http://www.ro.kde.org

On Sat, 10 Apr 2004 00:42:30 +0300, Claudiu Costin <claudiuc@kde.org>
wrote:

> Dear Bob,
>
> Actually, what is your backup command or script?
>Please note that isn't 100% rezolved if you just put
>quotes arround filenames.
>
>R.Mariotti(at)FinancialDataCorp.com (Bob Mariotti) wrote:
>
>> Our AIX servers provide a shared directory via Samba to multiple
>> Win98/XP desktops on our internal network. These PC access the shared
>> directory as a logical drive and then they make their own directory(s)
>> and save many of their files there. This has worked well for many
>> years.
>>
>> However, these users are now creating directories and files with the
>> windows allowable file names that include embedded spaces and even
>> single and double quote characters.
>>
>> When we try to backup our system including the shared directory and
>> all its recursive directories the AIX backup command is coughing at
>> these files that include these characters.
>>
>> When creating our list of files used to drive the backup we have tried
>> wrapping the filenames in double quotes but then ALL the files are
>> being rejected by the backup command with the error "Trouble accessing
>> file ......". My guess is that the backup command is looking for a
>> file with the " characters as an actual part of the filename.
>>
>> Has anyone come up across this issue before?
>>
>> Any ideas and/or suggestions as to how we can represent the filenames
>> to backup will use them?
>>
>> All suggestions appreciated.
>>
>> Bob
>
>kind regards,
>--
>Claudiu Costin, claudiuc@kde.org
>Linux-KDE Romania http://www.ro.kde.org

Hey - thanks for responding...

My backup scripe uses several iterations of both find and ls -1R
agains multiple starting directory mount points. The output of all of
the list creation scripts are appended to a tmp file.

The next step reads in the generated list and create another list with
fully qualified "relative" filenames (i.e.: relative to the starting
directory but fully qualified beyond).

This technique has worked well for many many years without incident.
Lately while scanning the resulting logs I noticed the backup error
message that reads "problem accessing file ........." where the
filenames have ALL been windows created filenames in a directory
structure hosts by samba. As stated in the original post most of
these filenames contain embedded spaces ond even the single quote
character (i.e.: mangled name) which is coming from the windows
systems.

The daily backup is supposed to do a 100% data backup INCLUDING the
samba provided drives.

Hope this helps.... any additional questions/suggestions? Even after
spending another day 1/2 on it I still have not been able to oversome
this.

BTW - if the filename list does NOT contain embedded spaces or
embedded single quotes, the backup runs fine.

And, after manually encasing the filenames in doube quotes backup
STILL complains about the filename validity.

Bob