What is the problem you are having with rclone?

According to the rclone docs:

Valid remote names
Remote names are case sensitive, and must adhere to the following rules:

May contain number, letter, _, -, ., +, @ and space.
May not start with - or space.
May not end with space.

However, if RCLONE_CONFIG_* env vars are used, additional restrictions effectively apply.

For example, I defined a remote named "test.enc" of type crypt on top of local in the rclone.conf. As long as the password was specified directly in the config, everything worked fine. However, when I removed the password from the config and tried to supply it via an environment variable (RCLONE_CONFIG_TEST_ENC_PASSWORD), any command attempting to access the vault failed with the following error:

CRITICAL: Failed to create file system for "test.enc:": password not set in config file

Removing the '.' or replacing it with the '_' (for example, renaming the remote to test_enc) fixes the issue: specifying the password in the env var works as expected.

This seems like a natural consequence of the way environment variable names are restricted (e.g. no hyphens or dots are allowed), and the fact that remote names can be used as part of RCLONE_CONFIG_* env var names. It may not be trivial to address in code, but it would definitely be helpful to mention this explicitly in the documentation, to avoid confusion for users who intend to use "non-env-friendly" characters like dots and hyphens in their remote names.

What is your rclone version (output from rclone version)

> rclone --version

rclone v1.70.2
- os/version: ubuntu 24.04 (64 bit)
- os/kernel: 6.8.0-63-generic (x86_64)
- os/type: linux
- os/arch: amd64
- go/version: go1.24.4
- go/linking: static
- go/tags: none

Which OS you are using and how many bits (e.g. Windows 7, 64 bit)

Ubuntu 24.04, 64 bit

Which cloud storage system are you using? (e.g. Google Drive)

local+crypt

The command you were trying to run (e.g. rclone copy /tmp remote:tmp)

rclone -vv ls test.enc:

A log from the command with the -vv flag (e.g. output from rclone -vv copy /tmp remote:tmp)

2025/07/07 19:59:15 DEBUG : rclone: Version "v1.70.2" starting with parameters ["rclone" "-vv" "ls" "test.enc:"]
2025/07/07 19:59:15 DEBUG : Creating backend with remote "test.enc:"
2025/07/07 19:59:15 DEBUG : Using config file from "/home/user/.config/rclone/rclone.conf"
2025/07/07 19:59:15 CRITICAL: Failed to create file system for "test.enc:": password not set in config file

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