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 Lines: 41 Message-ID: <3553b2dd.3885339@news.warwick.net> References: NNTP-Posting-Host: m203-17.warwick.net To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp Precedence: bulk [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 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).