M$ to license FAT

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 11:58:00AM -0500, Taavi Burns wrote:
> IIRC OS/2 could only do long filenames with HPFS.  Your DOS apps
> could access HPFS files through what looked like a network share,
> but long filenames would be totally masked.  It was suboptimal,
> but possibly better than allowing two filenames (one explicit, one
> implicit) for one file.
> 
> There's a very happy "feature" of VFAT.
> 
> Create a file "Thisisaverylongfile2.txt".  Note that the short
> version of this comes out as "THISIS~1.TXT".
> 
> Create a file "Thisisaverylongfile1.txt".  Note that the short
> version of this comes out as "THISIS~2.TXT".
> 
> Now "del *1.TXT" and watch BOTH FILES DISSAPEAR.
> 
> Did you really mean to do that?

Last I tried most MS (DOS based at least) OSs didn't allow wildcards
before other characters.

abc*.txt is allowed
*abc.txt is not.  Not sure, but it may even match *.txt actually on some
versions of DOS.  That is pretty scary actually.

Lennart Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml