I am pretty sure it's impossible as . is the equivalent of here in POSIX systems... YMMV

Yup, which is why I’m curious!

From what I can gather with a quick Googling it's not possible.

$ mkdir --file
mkdir: illegal option -- -
usage: mkdir [-pv] [-m mode] directory_name ...
$ # but we can get around these rules!!!
$ mkdir -- --file
$ ls
--file dot

OK, in that case I may have to give up 😞

I guess that if you really wanted to be able to do it you could consider forking a linux distribution and making some very low level changes so that another character, say ^ means here and then you could use . to your heart's content, but honestly I would not know where to start.

So … If I create a folder named . on this custom linux distribution, tar it into an archive and extract on my normal computer, it would … presumably crash on trying to extract?

Almost certainly, yes

I would love to say that I am going to write a custom linux distribution to try this out, but I am afraid I won’t be able to do that today. Thanks for the replies --- I didn’t imagine that this was an OS-wide assumption, I just assumed it was a bash/zsh-thing!

No worries - I think that you would need a custom shell as well, but I think it's baked into the OS; I could be wrong about that.

if you have a folder named . you can't do something like ./run.sh if run.sh is in the current directory... and that is the way to do. and thinking about, you already have a dir names . the one you are in. so you can't create another one with that name.

Right, that makes sense.

maybe on some really obscure non posix file system you can get some thing different... but then you'll have to run it on a OS/390, OS/400, HP3000, CTOS or any other obscure OS maybe?

would this be impossible on Windows too?

don't think so... as I can remember you can do cd.. on a window/dos terminal.. so I suspect . to be there as well

so yes .;)

I am fairly sure that on Unix/Linux, "." is effectively automatically created in every directory when the directory is created, and cannot be renamed. Also ".."

I would be very very wary if you somehow renamed them of what kinds of software would go horribly wrong afterwards.

The assumption of what those names mean is deeply embedded in lots of places.

If all you want is a tar file with a folder named . there is no need to create a custom linux distro. The .tar file format is presumably simple enough that you can just write a small program to create that, maybe even a hex editor suffices.

Good point. Then I could try extract it and see what happens :thinking_face:

Best I could think of: try/nvm act/zap

fwrd/back done/oops

cmmt/abrt

tfn/rfn would still map to transaction/rollback fn

Yesss/oh-fck

ok/ko nice suggestions. Team humans 1 - Team genai 0 (they gave me ludicruous non-solutions)

::arrow_up: / ::arrow_down: also happen to be keywords 🌀

do/undo

::white_check_mark: /::boom:

giterdone/whoanelly

:do, :od