It’s pretty common to exchange files with people using other operating systems (Windows, Linux, Unix, etc.). Apple has published a detailed with some guidelines on the characters to avoid to make sure that you can exchange files successfully:

: / \ ¢™$® . , [ ] { } ( ) ! ; " ' * ? < > |

This is old news for experienced IT users but I thought that the less techies would benefit from this info.

To be able to successfully exchange files with users of other operating systems, you should generally:

• Avoid “special” characters as seen above
• Restrict filename length
• Use filename extensions
• Add times and dates to filenames by avoiding the / and \ characters
• Avoid adding hard-drive/volume names in the filename