Re: Question around of remote description

[Mike Fleetwood]

On Wed, 17 Jun 2020 at 07:16, Eric L. Zolf <ewl+rdiffbackup@lavar.de> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> in the course of the review of PR #404 we came to challenge the quite
> complex quoting rules allowed when you backup to/from a remote location.
>
> Our question is if anybody is relying on those (too) complex quoting
> rules to make their backup work? Else it'll allow us to radically
> simplify the code.
>
> More details: if you backup to/from a remote site, the description is of
> the form `host::path` (e.g. `rdiff-backup /home
> myuser@myhost::/srv/backup/homebak`), and the current quoting allows to
> have the double colons (::) somewhere in the `host` or `path` part of
> the remote description. And the question is if anybody knows of a
> concrete use case for this possibility?
>
> For even more gory details, the man page states the quoting rules in the
> REMOTE OPERATION section.
>
> Thanks, Eric
>
> PS: and yes, double colons are a valid POSIX path part (`touch ::`
> works), but who really needs it?
>
> https://github.com/rdiff-backup/rdiff-backup/pull/404

It looks like colon is not a valid character in a host name so that
shouldn't be used anywhere.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3523028/valid-characters-of-a-hostname
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostname