MC handling of extfs supplied ls - style dirs & more

Pavel Roskin proski at gnu.org
Tue Sep 3 05:56:25 UTC 2002


Hello!

> Now, after the longish start, D64 images have files with names of up to
> 16 character. These may contain spaces, '/' and all kind of other characters.
> We found it to be incomfortable to parse out the spaces, since the linux
> filesystems handle such stuff nicely usually. Currently only '/' and '@' are 
> escaped and awk 'gsub'ed' to a '_' ...

I don't understand relevance of Linux filesystems in this context.

> I found, that especially leading spaces in filenames cause tremendous problems
> towards midnight commander. I also did a quick cross-compare with the supplied
> zip filesystem. A file containing e.g.   " test"  and "test.d64" can be 
> entered fine, but only "test.d64" can be extracted. " test" only can be 
> extracted using e.g. unzip. Though, MC handles (space)files on the normal 
> filesystems just fine.

extfs tries to be flexible in respect to its input in assumption that the 
filenames are "not too strange".  That's the price to be paid to be 
compatible with many different listings.

It should be possible to implement a variant of extfs with more fixed 
format and less limitations on filenames.  It may be useful for other 
script-generated listings.

If exact compatibility with the Linux filesystem driver (if you have one)  
is not required, you can replace problematic symbols with less problematic
ones (underscores should be fine).

> Two more small questions ... on common files with no spaces or funky stuff no 
> such problems come up, just when copying a file into the archive using c1541 
> again, MC moans about: 
> 
> Cannot chown target file "/data/c64/d64/t~d64#d64/README"
> Function not implemented (38)
> 
> Afterwards the file was copied fine to the D64-Image, but MC keeps telling me 
> it has 755 as permission, although only r--r--r-- OR rw-rw-rw-  are actually 
> possible in the  list  function there is.
> Is it possible to directly flush the cache somehow, or tell MC some different
> behaviour here ? (C-r doesn't really re-read the archive contents for me. it 
> should, hm ?)

extfs clearly needs more work.  Also it should be possible to ignore
permission problems in a more graceful way.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin




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