🚀 go-pugleaf

Alain Wyss <alain.wyss@team.bluewin.com> wrote:
> 8.3... in alten Tagen konnten File-Namen unter Dos und Windows nur 8
> Zeichen, nen Punkt, und nochmal 3 Zeichen haben. Sieht man noch heute in der
> Dos-Shell mittels eines "dir /x"

They still aren't really stored natively normally (ie read: long) on Windows
95, 98 and other similar environments. The long (ie normal) name is still
stored as an artifact (see below). Infact, it is a common problem when
securing WWW servers by file-name access: there is always a MS-DOS
compatibility filename lying around, or a new old strange way to
name the file. Plagues Microsoft Windows NT (and possibly 2000) as
well, even on NTFS (when the MS-DOS mangling hasn't been disabled ---
if you disable it you will have problems when non NT clients access
the filesystem through SMB, for example --- I am no Microsoft
proprietary environment expert, though).

The OS (well, hum) stores the file name on a MS-DOS filesystem (aka FAT)
as a (dynamically) mangled 8+3 file like usual, and then uses
device-type entries in the directory to store longer versions. This
maintains a level of compatibility with the plain old MS-DOS filesystem.

The question whether those device-type entries were part of the (old)
plan to merge MS-DOS and Xenix (Microsoft's implementation of UNIX) that
was intended infact to kill UNIX at that time (as the MacOS/MS-DOS
merge that was announced about 1987, and never happened, e.g.)
is left to the reader :)

With NTFS I don't know how it works, but at least there, the hack is
for the `compatibility' name, not for the long (ie: normal) file name,
which is better.

It's typically that kind of stuff that has absolutely no interest in
properly designed systems. Or only when you have to care about
compatibility with Microsoft, in short with legacy systems.