Which characters are allowed and which of them must be escaped on the command line in different operating systems?
Linux/Windows/Unix/… file names: Which characters are allowed? Which are unescaped
command-line-interfacefilesystemslinuxwindows
Related Solutions
The command you are looking for is called nslookup, works fine for reverse lookups IFF someone has configured a reverse zone file, which they don't always do.
Best Answer
There's a discussion of filename characters in the Wikipedia article on File Names.
You may find this essay informative: Fixing Unix/Linux/POSIX Filenames.
This article compares OS X and Windows XP: X vs. XP: Forbidden Characters in Filenames (PDF, see pp approx. 64-66).
Things That Shouldn’t Be in File Names for $1,000 Alex
I don't know which characters must be un-escaped, but in Linux, it's probably not a good idea to escape the characters that may have special meaning such as "n" (newline), "t" (tab) and others, but that's generally not a problem in file operations. Perhaps you mean "escaped" rather than "unescaped". The most common ones are ones that the shell will interpret such as space, ">", "<", etc. See some of the articles I linked for a discussion of those.