Accidental use of "/" in file names

I accidentally used a "/" in a filename (I know it's invalid), but came up with some interesting results. The file was on a USB attached drive. On the Mac that had the attached drive I could see the filename. I have two MacBooks that are network attached via wi-fi to the drive via a share on the attached Mac, and on one of them I could see the filename, and on the other I couldn't. Once I dropped the "/" it became visible to the one that couldn't see it.
Anyone have any suggestions why one MacBook could see it  and the other couldn't?

wa1oui wrote:
I was just hoping someone else might have run into this before and could immediately reply with the answer they had found.
As for this being of academic interest, this IS a discussion group.
Well if you want to discuss, that can be done...
A long time ago, in an operating system far, far away (namely MacOS) there were no such things as paths, let along delimiters. People had too much trouble dealing with that, so they used ':' as a path delimiter. Anything else was allowed.
Fast forward to the future and we are using a UNIX system called MacOSX. The only character not allowed is the UNIX filesystem delimiter '/'. However, the Finder, and lots of other legacy programs still allowed '/' in file names and didn't allow ':'. In such programs, there is sometimes some path delimiter magic twiddling going on. In the Finder, you can create a file name with a '/'. If you then run Terminal.app and do a UNIX directory listing, you will see your file with a ':' where the '/' should be. The same thing works in reverse. If you use various modern and/or UNIX tools create a file with a colon in the name, it will show up in the Finder as a '/'. This "feature" is strictly for backwards compatibility. You should consider both characters to be forbidden.
Plus, if you ever want to share your files with Windows users, you should consider all the assorted Windows special characters to be forbidden too. Depending on what software you use here or there, it may or may not work. There is no real definitive list as software is being modified and upgraded all the time.
There is nothing wrong with having spaces in file or folder names either. However, some lazy UNIX programmers forget this and things may fail, perhaps spectacularly, if you make heavy use of open-source programs.

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