From:	71231 DOT 104 AT compuserve DOT com (Richard Slobod)
Newsgroups:	comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject:	Re: fixpath problem in Novell drives.
Date:	Sat, 09 May 1998 01:38:24 GMT
Organization:	Warwick Online
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Message-ID:	<3553b2dd.3885339@news.warwick.net>
References:	<Pine DOT SUN DOT 3 DOT 91 DOT 980506130343 DOT 1846A-100000 AT is>
NNTP-Posting-Host:	m203-17.warwick.net
To:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
DJ-Gateway:	from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp

[Please excuse the duplicate posting if you've seen this before, but
my news server was having some problems when I originally posted it
and neither DejaNews nor Alta Vista have the message in their
archives, so I'm assuming it never got out onto the net.]


Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il> wrote:
>
>On Tue, 5 May 1998, Richard Slobod wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
>First, before you get to DOS calls, some programs parse the file names by 
>the application code or library functions, which mostly don't understand 
>UNCs.

Yes, I mentioned this effect in part of my message that you trimmed
(to refrain:  " . . . 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 . . . ").

>And second, before DOS passes the UNC to the redirector, it needs to 
>establish what drive does this UNC belong to (since only the drive 
>determines whether the file should be handled by some redirector, and by 
>which one).  AFAIK, DOS doesn't have any UNC support built into its code, 
>so it fails here, and the calls you issue fails with it.

As I stated, I've gotten non-UNC-aware software to work with UNC names
when the above effect can be bypassed.  I did this without mapping a
drive letter to the drive being accessed, so I don't see how any such
translation could have been occurring.  I haven't tried this when
multiple network redirectors are loaded, although the CD-ROM
extensions being loaded (MSCDEX is a redirector too, after all) didn't
prevent it from working.  I also haven't tried this with a network
redirector other than the one included in LANtastic 5.0 (it happens to
be the only one installed on the machine that I tried this on), but I
don't know of anything unusual about that redirector (it most
certainly does seem to be a true redirector unlike Novell's NETX
shells).

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