Hey, I was wondering, are there any special characters that cannot exist in a Linux file/directory name? I know you can add some with escaping, but I was curious if there are some you just cannot have. Thanks!

I don't know if Linux itself has special not allowed characters, but in general the characters you can/can't used are set by the filesystem, not the OS. Here's a cool page that gives information on the special characters for different filesystems and more:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems

The short answer is, the normal filesystem used on a Linux machine is ext2, ext3 or ReiserFS, and for all of them you should be able to use anything but /

Yep, with linux you can create wierd files/folder names. You can even use a space in a direcotry name. This is used to create somewhat hidden directories I guess you could say....

ex.
mkdir " "
or mkdir " "
or mkdir " ..."
etc etc....