Comment 6 for bug 543478

Eh. Well. I'm a bit surprised that you won't allow forward slashes if you try to parse a path. It's actually a quite common character in the Linux world. Even other Unixes use it for separating components of a path. And since people use it so much, it should be as easy as possible to actually give a path to qemu. The excuse that it "is used to create special expressions" (which, btw?!) doesn't hold. I'm pretty confident that people use the '/' character to separate components of a path rather than doing "special expressions". Especially when a path the a file is expected! So if there are still "special expressions" needed in a path, it'd be better to select a different character.

Even if you don't agree on that, I really believe the user deserves some explanation along with the error message that is printed as I've pointed out in comment #0.