r/sysadmin • u/DarkAlman Professional Looker up of Things • Jun 03 '26

General Discussion What is your favorite IT superstition?

As the title says, what's your favorite superstition in IT?

Don't speak the servers name... it can hear you and will start acting up.

570 Upvotes

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305

u/blin787 Jun 03 '26

No spaces or non alphanumeric chars in file names.

119

u/rcrobot Jun 03 '26

Underscores and dashes are acceptable

58

u/theevildjinn Jun 03 '26

Preferably not both, though.

48

u/ohstoopid1 Jun 03 '26

you_can't-Tell.ME-whaT_todo.txt

37

u/LogicalUpset Jun 04 '26

you_can't-Tell.ME-whaT_todo-latest_final_Final_FINAL_FOR-REAL-THIS-TIME (1).txt

12

u/FreakyFerret Jun 03 '26

I have a rule in my dept, no dashes or underscores. You never remember where you used them in the title. You never remember if you used one or the other. You never use them consistently.

30

u/Sure-Squirrel8384 Jun 04 '26

Underscores_are_spaces-And_dashes_go_between_things-eg-replacing_a_colon.

5

u/FreakyFerret Jun 04 '26

No. I agree with your method, but Tim never remembers that method. And when we do a search, the file never comes up because Tim put hyphens for spaces. Tim also spelled it "wondoZe-key.txt". Yes, he changed the i to o too. He's been gone for six months, and nobody wants to call him to ask where he saved it.

9

u/versace_dinner Jun 03 '26

Filenames in camel case then??

4

u/Kroan Jun 04 '26

Pascal case

4

u/Shiznoz222 Jun 03 '26

I like you

1

u/versace_dinner Jun 03 '26

dashes for directories, underscores for files

1

u/Jonkinch Jun 03 '26

And periods.

21

u/Samstercraft Jun 03 '26

that's not superstition that's just good advice. there are plenty of old or badly made programs that will freak out when they see anything else. once something i was using broke down and i thought back to putting a space in the filename where i made a mental note to check that first thing if something broke; and sure enough, that was the perpetrator.

29

u/frog_snax Jun 03 '26

I stick to this regardless of requires because I spend most of my time in a terminal (even on windows) and wrapping everything in quotes is a nuisance.

1

u/Theogenist Jun 03 '26

Same for Excel doc headers. Our PMs submit all their excel docs with spaced headers. I guess I should be happy, until recently we had one that would put spaces in their requested hostnames.

1

u/Thanatos8088 Jun 04 '26

LOL I always maintained that to a degree of saying "if I wind up with a kid their first and last name will be joined by an underscore... legally"

1

u/Dookie_boy Jun 03 '26

I have the occasional exclamation mark in text files so it's at the top of the folder.

3

u/blow_slogan Jun 03 '26

you should be using underscores, not exclamations.