Mail Archives: cygwin/2006/03/24/23:07:09
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According to Brian Dessent on 3/24/2006 8:51 PM:
>
> The colon is used by NTFS to signify alternate data streams. You can
> google for more information about this, e.g.
> <http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs-multiple.htm>.
And that would explain how I managed to create an undeletable file the
other day. I had been wondering what the explanation was. Mainly for
archive purposes, the sharutils upstream maintainer made the mistake of
creating a file named ":getpo" in CVS a while ago (which he has now
renamed to "getpo.sh" because of my undeletable file problem). But when
"cvs up" grabs a new file, it first names it ".new.<filename>", in this
case, ".new.:getpo". So my "cvs up" failed because the file ".new.:getpo"
didn't exist to be renamed to ":getpo", but at the same time, Windows had
just created a ".new." file including the trailing dot. And it was
practically undeletable because trailing dots normally can't exist, so no
cygwin functions could reach it. I finally got rid of the problem file by
using the file's alternate 8.3 name, "new~1", but it sure threw me for a
loop trying to figure out how to delete the file.
It would be nice if cygwin could be more proactive in recognizing : as
invalid in non-managed mounts, rather than passing the : on to the Windows
filename functions, in order to avoid the creation of undeletable
filenames such as ".new." via the help of a colon, but I can live with the
current behavior if adding such a check would slow down the common case.
- --
Life is short - so eat dessert first!
Eric Blake ebb9 AT byu DOT net
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