Date: Thu, 4 Nov 1999 19:08:41 +0200 (IST)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
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To: Jeff Williams <jeffw AT darwin DOT sfbr DOT org>
cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: long filenames and Windows NT
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On Thu, 4 Nov 1999, Jeff Williams wrote:

> OK, this is just a first impression, but I d/l'ed Crabtree's sources
> and took a look, and it seems that the approach he takes would also
> work for an LFN driver for plain DOS.

There is a big difference between doing it on DOS and on NT: NT already 
supports long file names for native Win32 programs, while DOS does not.  
So, for NT, Andrew Crabtree needed only to find a way of converting long 
names to the corresponding short ones, but otherwise he used the NT 
filesystem to do the real work.

In contrast, to produce the same on MS-DOS, you will need to bypass DOS 
entirely, and roll your own code that reads/writes the disk on the sector 
level, because the LFN driver needs to read and write the special LFN 
entries in a directory, and DOS won't let you access a directory as a 
normal file.