From: 71231 DOT 104 AT compuserve DOT com (Richard Slobod) Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp Subject: Re: fixpath problem in Novell drives. Date: Tue, 05 May 1998 14:47:27 GMT Organization: Warwick Online Lines: 37 Message-ID: <354f19f0.511241@news.warwick.net> References: <354e826c DOT 6768297 AT news DOT warwick DOT net> NNTP-Posting-Host: m973-41.warwick.net To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp Precedence: bulk [posted and mailed] >Eli Zaretskii 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).