That's part of the vfat filesystem. It's a bad design. It's not
something Linux should try to change, because any possible solutions are
far uglier than the problem itself.
> Allowing for this, my suggested solution would be along the lines of
> using the mode bits to deal with the problem, based on something along
> the lines of the following:
And if this actually happens, I will personally volunteer to maintain a
patch that reverts to the current, sane behavior. The Linux vfat
filesystem makes vfat look like a real UNIX filesystem and does a good job
of it. It also makes the relevant extra operations that fit outside of
the normal file model available in a UNIX way (albeit, a poor UNIX way)
through ioctl. If you want to write a tool that tells you the 8.3 name on
a vfat filesystem, you can do so.
You *may* be able to effectively stuff broken Windows semantics into the
filesystem, but in the process you will make it ugly almost to the point
of being unusable, and you are changing the meaning of the values
retrieved by system calls (eg, stat()). That seems to me like a very bad
thing. If you really, really want access from Linux to a vfat filesystem
in a Windows-esque way, then go write yourself some tools to do that.
Don't ask people to write kernel-level kludges to do it badly.
Chris Smith <cd_smith@ou.edu>
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