I made a snide remark recently in a comment and felt the need to explain a bit about myself so other /. readers understand my areas of expertise and what I bring to the community.

  I am a software engineer - still a rookie by all accounts - but I have extensive experience in digital security & internet policy & governence. I am a founder of a small ISV providing software security assurance & metrics for government, military & corporate customers, and hold several patents in the field of automated software security assessing. My company, ***** ****, has given stake-holders the ability to manage the risks of their software deployment plans - critical in the post Sarbanes-Oakley Act world.

  On the technical side, I have a good deal of experience dealing with hardware & sofware security vendors. I've worked on projects ranging from Win32 kernel drivers, Solaris & Linux kernel modules, and all the way up into userland. I have formal training (through OSR) in Win32 device & file system drivers, and have a thorough understanding of the NT architecture.

  So, in case anyone ever wonders "Why is this little bitch talking so much smack," and is curious enough to look at my profile, maybe they'll understand a little better where I come from. Respect my authoritah!

NTFS & FAT:
([a-zA-Z])(:\\\\)([a-zA-Z0-9[ \\.\\$%'`-\\{\\}~!#\\(\\)&_\\^\\\\]]*)

Edit: A more complete first capturing group would be ([a-zA-Z]{1,2}) to handle cases where the system has more than 26 assigned drive letters (eg: AA:\Foo)

  EXT2/3:
(/)([\\p{Print} ]*)

Why does copying files on a Windows NT 5-based computer (XP & 2003) peg the CPU to the point where the machine is useless? I don't want to devote 99% of my CPU to copying a 500 meg file over the network - it's going to take a long time and I know it'll take a long time, so just nice it and give me back my shell, damnit.

I mean, jeez. Spawn a thread and run it at low priortiy or something. Maybe someone who knows more about NT internals and is willing to justify boneheaded functionality can shed some light (and considering I used to write file system drivers for NT, you'd be surprised at how obscure a question this is).