Re: DOSEMU/DOSBOX question

[Paul Lagasse pglagasse@xxxxxxxx]

Wally, thanks very much for the explanation of the Dosemu truncation
style. If only understanding it would allow me to divine which file was
which.

A couple comments from what I've seen already and played with since

re
> b) with DOSEMU, scanning for a dot is from the left, not from the
> right, so whereas "afilename.tar.zip" would become something like
> "AFILEN~1.ZIP" under Windows (and therefore retain it's "file type"),
> it would become something like "AFILE~XX.TAR" under DOSEMU. This can
> result in it being opened by the wrong app, so Windows does better on
> this one.
I don't see evidence of a misattribution of the extension in a mangled
filename (a clever and pejorative enough term, indeed). In my Xy
directory listing:

settings.bak.tar.gz  becomes SETTI~1J.GZ
howdy de do.htm.dos.txt becomes HOWDY~Y6.TXT
(BTW, in Xy I can also see the hidden Linux backup for "howdy etc," ie
"howdy de do.htm.dos.txt~" -- which displays as HOWDY~3I.TXT. If I open
this in Xy and edit and save it, the Linux file "howdy...txt~" no longer
exists, and I get two new files (whose Linux names are howdy~3i.txt and
howdy~3i.bak). Then, if I edit "howdy de do.htm.dos.txt" again in Gedit
and save, thus creating a new hidden "howdy de do.htm.dos.txt~", I can
see two instances of "HOWDY~3I.TXT" in Xy's dir, one for "howdy~3i.txt"
and one for "howdy de do.htm.dos.txt~". But I can only open
"howdy~3i.txt" in Xy -- even though I do everything that would normally
force Xy to open "howdy de do.htm.dos.txt~". So it would seem that if
there are two files with the same name in Dosemu, and one of the names
is truncated, Dosemu will only let Xy open the untruncated one.)

re
> c) DOSEMU adds an extension of "___" (three underscores) if the
> original filename had no extension.
I think, from what I've seen, that it only adds these underscores if
the file is a hidden file that begins with a period, such as ".dosemurc".


re
> 8. ...So, the bottom line, as I understand it, is that any file you
> create from DOS will therefore be 8.3, but lower case, as it actually
> is created within Linux. Similarly, any Linux file that is 8.3, but
> other than all lower case, will be unaccessible to old DOS apps, period.
I think that this last item is only a problem when there is a conflict
between two files with the same name, save for differences in
capitalization. The README.TXT I created using Gedit can be seen and
(once I delete readme.txt and Readme.txt) opened in Xy. All the files I
imported from WinXP that I work on in Xy were, when copied into Ubuntu,
in uppercase. I have had no problem opening these files in Xy, though
once they are edited and saved, their filenames are lowercased.
These filename case-conversions are a nonissue in Xy under Dosemu, but I
do other things with the files where changes in capitalization gum up
the works. A simple copy command, for example, is case-sensitive in
Linux, and so gains added complexity when some files with a certain
pattern are u.c. and some are l.c. It also makes a mess of my nsgmls
parser, which is blazingly fast in Linux compared to Windows, but now
requires careful attention to case-sensitivity. I found
"file-rename-utils" on the Web, which, once installed, allowed me to
lowercase entire directories that I had imported from WinXP with one
command, and so dispose of my case inconsistencies.
(BTW, Dosbox -- in Linux -- creates its filenames in uppercase, and I'd
bet this is its standard behavior across platforms.)

Paul


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