Creating spack env fails because of special characters (dot) in env name

[manodeep]

Following the documentation in the README, I tried to create a new environment

[~/codes/access-nri @gadi05] spack env create access-esm1.6 spack.yaml
==> Error: 'access-esm1.6': names must start with a letter, and only contain letters, numbers, _, and -.

The command succeeded after removing the . from the env name.

[~/codes/access-nri/ACCESS-ESM1.6 @gadi05] spack env create access-esm1p6 spack.yaml
==> Created environment access-esm1p6 in: /g/data/tm70/ms2335/spack/0.22/environments/access-esm1p6
==> Activate with: spack env activate access-esm1p6

Related: It was also not clear which directory this statement should be executed in - from within the cloned ACCESS-ESM1.6 directory or somewhere else. (Based on the successful spack env command, it seems that the env is created/managed by spack and the working directory for that spack env command does not matter)

Edit: Working directory does matter and has to contain the relevant spack.yaml file 🤦🏾