What characters should be restricted from a Unix file name?
Firstly, what you're describing is black listing. Your better option is to white list your characters, as it is easier (from a user perspective) to have characters inserted rather than taken away.
In terms of what would be good in a unix environment:
- a-z
- A-Z
- 0-9
- underscore (
_) - dash (
-) - period (
.)
Should cover your basics. Spaces can be okay, but make things difficult. Windows users love them, unix/linux don't. So depending on your target audience choose accordingly.
Although the accepted answer might have truth I think there's a benefit to having some restrictions that could be potentially annoying for scripting or other stuff:
- forward slash (/)
- backslash (\)
- NULL (\0)
- tick (`)
- starts with a dash (-)
- star (*)
- pipes (|)
- semicolon (;)
- quotations (" or ')
- colon (:)
( - maybe space though I'm reluctant to add that.)
As you can see you might just be better off whitelisting as @Gavin suggests...