File anming conventions?

[David Bovill]

A quick question - I now the info is out there on the net, but Id like to
see what other people are doing. I"m setting a naming convention for files
and a while back I would have stuck to the 8.3 dos character limits - no
spaces etc just to be safe. Now it seems more important to use characters
that also make nice urls than anything else - but I still avoid "funny
chars" so that scripts don"t have to escape anything... but what exactly are
these "funny chars", and what are there potential problems? Here are my
first thoughts, comments very wellcome:

 1) spaces - need to escape file names on the command line (bash scripts),
urlEncoding results in "+

 2) "/" or "\" or "." or ":"  - just plain bad idea - too easily confused
with file paths on various systems.

 3) "|" - not sure. Not pretty for urlEncoding

 4) "_" seems harmless. Often used.

 5) "," ";" - no real idea. Interesting?

 6) Any of "# ! [ ] { }" - no idea? Ugly?


Basically i would like to use a delimiter so that scripts can extract some
basic information from the file name. I can use "_", but if I need a second
delimiter what should I use - my thoughts are to use "|" which would lead to
file names like:

  opnMenu_Tree|Tools.rev

Any thoughts?