Date: Sun, 01 Mar 1998 21:46:04 -0700 From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> To: "Jesse T Kipp" <zaphod@imailbox.com> Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: MS-DOS file system: Can it handle FAT32? Long file names? Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.19980301214604.00b55100@mail.lariat.org> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980301215653.384A-100000@foo.bar.com> References: <3.0.5.32.19980301145433.00a2e3b0@mail.lariat.org>
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At 10:02 PM 3/1/98 -0600, zaphod wrote: >As for at I know, FreeBSD doesn't support FAT32 systems. It can read FAT16 >file systems with long name support (AKA VFAT) but if a file was like >THEFILENAME it will appear as THEFIL~1 because window 95 keeps an internal >record of the long file names. Not so. The record is on the disk in special directory entries; the file system simply needs to know how to read them! It's not hard to do, and the details of the scheme are not secret. >Don't alter THEFIL~1 while in FreeBSD, >because windows isn't good about handling such errors (it assumes that >nothing else will access the file system, I guess...). Actually, all that will happen is that the long version of the name may be invalidated, in which case Windows 95 will see the file as having its short name only. This *can* be a problem, though, if a program is relying upon seeing the long file name. Again, it's not hard to keep the short and long names in sync! The name-mangling scheme is documented, as is the scheme for storing long names. I'd be glad to help whoever is hacking this code to implement the relevant extensions. >(p.s. it would be nice if you could get a mail client that puts line >breaks every 60 columns so mail doesn't appear as one long line for some >of us... ;)...) More and more, applications are shifting from the "line-oriented" paradigm (in which lines are explicitly terminated by line breaks) to the "paragraph-oriented" paradigm (in which text flows to the end of the paragraph unless hard line breaks are included). The latter paradigm is part of HTML as well as most GUI wordprocessors, and is incorporated into most e-mail programs. Any e-mail client should be able to wrap long "lines" if necessary. What are you using to read your mail? If it doesn't know how to handle the paragraph-oriented paradigm, it'd probably be a good idea to fix it! Netscape, Eudora, AOL, and the many Web-based e-mail services aren't going to go back to line-oriented text, so we should write tools that recognize and handle the equally valid paragraph-oriented model. --Brett Glass P.S. -- I've *tried* to force Eudora to insert hard returns into this message, but don't know if it'll work. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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