I was expecting an uninformed rant, but got an informed essay (however it is still rantish in parts).<p>Much of the position for greater restriction in allowed characters is based on shell scripts. I can definitely get behind this, but have a hard time resolving it with my irrational love of the simplistic current restrictions (almost none) which is based on tradition and having run into these kinds of filename problems maybe a handful of times in over 16 years of daily UNIX use. In my own experience, it's so rare that "how do you remove a file that starts with a dash?" is one of those trivial system admin job interview questions. Interfacing with other even more braindead systems, like DOS, CIFS and ISO, with their filename codepage support, who try to do The Right Thing(tm) (well, ahem, One of The Right Things(tm)) and fail at it, is really the regular sticking point.