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#### 8.3.1 Portable Names

Use portable file and member names. A name is portable if it contains only ASCII letters and digits, ‘`/`’, ‘`.`’, ‘`_`’, and ‘`-`’; it cannot be empty, start with ‘`-`’ or ‘`//`’, or contain ‘`/-`’. Avoid deep directory nesting. For portability to old Unix hosts, limit your file name components to 14 characters or less.

If you intend to have your `tar` archives to be read under MSDOS, you should not rely on case distinction for file names, and you might use the GNU `doschk` program for helping you further diagnosing illegal MSDOS names, which are even more limited than System V’s.