-- Martin Bonner Pi Technology, Milton Hall, Ely Road, Milton, Cambridge, CB4 6WZ +44 1223 203894 ________________________________ From: boost-bounces@lists.boost.org on behalf of Yitzhak Sapir Looking at the invalid set of characters in your [Bronek Kozicki's] URL -- "< > : " / \ |" it becomes quite clear that the logic behind these is that they are reserved tokens in the command shell. But, in fact, so is "question mark" or "asterisk." a) ':', '/', and '\' are seperators in a path (nothing to do with the command shell). b) ? and * are /not/ reserved tokens in the command shell. It is a continuing pain to Windows command line tools authors that the command shell does not expand wildcards - that has to be done by each individual tool. Similary tokenizing arguments is not done by the command shell, but by each tool - and to make that even mildly possible, forbidding " in filenames makes that a lot easier. I don't see the logic behind >, <, and |, but I wouldn't assume it is the command shell that forces that.