Mail Archives: djgpp/1998/05/05/13:59:42
[posted and mailed]
>Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il> wrote:
>On Tue, 5 May 1998, Richard Slobod wrote:
>> Actually, only Novell's old NETX clients worked that way and they
>> didn't support UNC names
>
>Not as far as I know. It is true that only old NETX clients would grab
>the DOS interrupt, but their support of UNCs is okay.
What version of the client have you tried this with? I suppose they
could've snuck in UNC support in one of the later revisions and I
didn't notice (and it's been quite a while since I've used NETX in any
case).
>Actually, the later versions of Novell DOS clients are more of a problem
>here. That's because the DOS redirector interface is actually a callback
>mechanism: DOS does all the usual work and calls the redirector only when
>it needs to perform an actual operation on a file, and the drive in
>question is marked as a networked drive.
>
>So, when using the newer Novell clients, the support for UNCs under DOS
>should be worse, since DOS itself cannot grok names like \\SERVER\SYS\DIR.
At least some DOS calls seem to understand UNC at least to the extent
that they recognize it as something that should be passed to the
redirector for processing. It can actually be rather interesting to
try feeding UNC pathnames to non-UNC-aware software (which is most
certainly not doing any special processing to support UNC) to see to
what extent it works; of course, what most commonly happens is that
the program barfs on what it considers an invalid file specification
without ever attempting to pass it to DOS, but I've found that you
can, for instance, get the DOS Editor to accept (and properly function
with) a UNC name on the command line although not within the program's
file dialogs (this was under MS-DOS 6.22 and LANtastic 5.0).
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