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Which characters are allowed and safe for ZFS file system name? Are this characters only ASCII or UTF-8 is supported?

'@' is not allowed because it is reserved for snapshots.

PS: I play with FreeBSD 8.2, 9-RC1 and CURRENT+

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Only alphanumeric characters, space*, "-", "_", "." and ":" are accepted for file systems names (and other datasets) under ZFS. The maximum file system name length is 255 characters.

Note that this limitation can easily be "workarounded" by setting a valid directory name as a mount point. The latter can be an unlimited sequence of any character from any Unicode character set and is including "@". Of course, "/" is still forbidden being the path delimiter and "null" is excluded as being the string termination character.

Note that space is not documented as allowed but is accepted anyway. I wouldn't recommend using it anyway as it would possibly break tools.

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  • Thanks, I don't worry about mount points, only about datasets
    – Eir Nym
    Commented Oct 30, 2011 at 12:28
  • Just for clarification: ZFS allows everything in file and directory names, except for / and \0, correct?
    – user
    Commented Jul 31, 2013 at 9:14
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    @MichaelKjörling That is correct, ZFS has no forbidden characters outside both of these delimiters.
    – jlliagre
    Commented Jul 31, 2013 at 11:46
  • @jlliagre Great, thanks for confirming what I expected.
    – user
    Commented Jul 31, 2013 at 12:02
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    @EdwardNedHarvey – touch /zfs/test/foo\#bar works just fine for me (with ZFS on Ubuntu). You just have to escape it because the shell would otherwise interpret your # as the beginning of a comment. (Also, that's a ZFS filename rather than a ZFS dataset name.)
    – Adam Katz
    Commented Jan 23, 2022 at 4:13

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