8bitOrange

Nerd Post: The plot thickens with the filesystem

So in my earlier post (http://8bitorange.tumblr.com/post/6520843543/nerd-alert-web-workers-and-the-filesystem) I wrote about some issues I hit with web workers and filesystems. I talked to a couple of friends and the web workers may have just been me non-intelligently spawning to many workers at a single time. I will be revisiting that at a later date. But the files with a # in the name intrigued me. So I put a little test together today with the following files:

• a.rtf
• a^.rtf
• a-.rtf
• a,.rtf
• a!.rtf
• a’.rtf
• a().rtf
• a&.rtf
• a%.rtf
• a$.rtf
• a#.rtf
• a|.rtf
• a*.rtf

I then ran them through the following script:

self.addEventListener("message", function(e){
    
    var $this = self;
    var file = e.data;

    $this.webkitRequestFileSystem($this.TEMPORARY, 5*1024*1024, function(fs) {
        fs.root.getFile(file.name, {create: true, exclusive: false}, function(fileEntry) {
            
            fileEntry.file(function(f){
            
                if(f.size !== 0){
                
                    var date = new Date();
                    var newName = date.getMilliseconds() + '_' + file.name;
                    fileEntry.copyTo(fs.root, newName, function(entry){
                        entry.file(function(newFile){
                            $this.postMessage({'success': true, 'msg': 'File Written', 'file': newFile});
                            
                        });
                    });
                    
                } else {
                    
                    fileEntry.createWriter(function(fileWriter) {
            
            			fileWriter.write(file);
            			$this.postMessage({'success': true, 'msg': 'File Written', 'file': file});
            			
            
            		}, function(error){
            		    $this.postMessage({'success': false, 'msg': 'write', 'error': error});
            		    
            		});
                    
                }
                
                
            });
             

    	}, function(error){
    	   $this.postMessage({'success': false, 'msg': 'get', 'error': error, 'file': file});
    	   
    	});
    
    }, function(error){
        $this.postMessage({'success': false, 'msg': 'filesystem', 'error': error});
        
    });
}, false);

This is pretty basic stuff, I’m just copying the file with a modified name if it does exist and otherwise writing a new file if it doesn’t. I then return what file uploaded or whether there was an error. I came upon some interesting results that I thought I would share.

All files uploaded fine with exception of 3:

• a*.rtf
• a|.rtf
• a#.rtf (as expected….sort of)

The first two threw an error and died, which is fine, now I know, but the third did something odd and unexpected. It chopped the name at the “#” and just saved “a” as a file, dropping “#.rtf”.

I’m going to keep looking into this, but for now it appears that #,*,| are all characters that are not allowed in the filesystem in Chrome.