5.6 Known Alternate Stream Names

Selection of an alternate stream name, is in principle, identical to selection of a filename. An application might need to check whether a name is in use prior to attempting to use a name. When an application has successfully avoided a file name conflict, it has complete control over any stream names that it might wish to use. It is advisable to use textual GUID (GUIDString) as stream names in order to avoid conflicts. Injection of streams into files that an application does not completely own has the potential to cause unpredictable behavior and can be flagged by virus scanning software.