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Date: Mon, 03 Feb 1997 16:42:08 -0500
To: dg AT dcs DOT st-and DOT ac DOT uk, opendos AT mail DOT tacoma DOT net
From: Takashi Toyooka <ttoyooka AT verisim DOT com>
Subject: Re: [opendos] OpenDOS + Win95 w/FAT32 
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At 20:27 1997/02/03 +0000, dg AT dcs DOT st-and DOT ac DOT uk wrote:
>>Have you folks thought about giving the inode number to 8.3 filenames?
>>An LFN app might see C:\Really.Long\Path.with.lots.of.dos\file23.tar.gz
>>and an 8.3 app would see C:i32456.dat.
>
[snip - example that basically says inode number is too hard to understand]

>I hate to say this, but the Win95 way: [snip - we all know it, right?]
>is probably the most intelligent way to go.
>
The only difficulty with the Win95 way is that the "~n" suffix that's
added depends on the order in which conflicting files are created.  There-
fore, if we had two files "tutorial01.txt" and "tutorial02.txt" created in
that order, the 8.3 names would be a nice, logical "tutori~1.txt" and
"tutori~2.txt"  However, if you then copied those two files to a different
directory, *in the reverse order*, the 8.3 filenames would be switched:

tutorial01.txt  ->  tutori~2.txt
tutorial02.txt  ->  tutori~1.txt

which would confuse the hell out of me, I can tell you.

Here at my workplace, we have a Linux/Windows network using Samba on the
Linux side.  Linux filenames are served to the Windows machines with a
shortened filename that contains characters hashed out of the original
filename.  It looks like this:

csear~a8.htm     1658   2-03-97  12:35 csearch1.html
csear~ts.htm      546   2-03-97  12:35 csearchc.html
csear~wg.htm      548   2-03-97  12:36 csearcht.html
csear~zk.htm     6514   2-03-97  12:35 csearch2.html

The names on the far right don't normally appear.  They are the actual
Linux names.

I like this method because the short name is wholly and solely dependent
on the long name, meaning it's the same no matter where and when you 
copy it.  I don't know the function that's used to generate the 8.3 names,
but I'm sure there's a Linux guru out there somewhere who could tell us.

Just my $0.02,
Takashi