M$ to license FAT

[James Knott]

Taavi Burns wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 11:47:05AM -0500, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> 
>>That would be DOS 7 (aka win95).  No version prior to Win95 (OR if you
>>ran NT) could do long filenames on FAT.  I think OS/2 had a way to do it
>>though.
> 
> 
> 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.

I believe OS/2 supported long file names on the desktop, but had chopped 
names on the FAT file system.  The long file name was stored as an 
extended attribute in a file called (IIRC) "EA DATA.SF".

> 
> 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?
> 


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