---
title: Special characters in directories
author:
  - Tibor Digana
date: 2019-05-10
---

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# Working Directory with special characters

You can use a colon (`:`) in the cwd on Linux but you have to turn the path separator from colon to some other character, see [SUREFIRE-1617](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SUREFIRE-1617)

You should change the classpath separator (we do not guarantee that your application and test would run seamlessly) in order to avoid collisions with paths within the forked JVM:

```xml
<argLine>-Dpath.separator=;</argLine>
```

For more information about the configuration parameter `workingDirectory` see the chapter [Forked Test Execution](./fork-options-and-parallel-execution.html#Forked_Test_Execution).

# Local Repository with special characters

The plugin supports special characters (i.e. a colon (`:`)) in the path of Maven local repository. The compiler does not support it and therefore the sources have to be compiled by another command in advance.
