Fatfsys "bug"

QNX Newsgroups (Archives) qdn.public.qnx4
1

Hi,
I guess I’d call it a bug, I’d rather blame Windows for it than QNX, but
Windows handles a certain case differently.

Recently I put a selection of my MP3 collection onto a FAT32 partition and
from QNX accessed the partition. I was organizing the music, so I wrote a
quick ID3v1 tag grabber and had a program build a heirarchy of music
(Artist/Album/Song). After conversion, I was copying the new form over to
another drive (in Windows) and kept getting an open file error when it tried
copying the music.

I narrowed it down to REM (QNX’s Fatfsys allowed the directory “R.E.M.” to
be made). In Windows, it doesn’t like directories with trailing periods
(why?!?! I think I should be allowed to make one with one if I want!).
Anyway, I tested this in Windows by making a directory “R.E.M.” and it
immediately threw away the last period.

Another is how two paths with the same name but capitalization is different
(Bush vs. BUSH) are recognized as two separate entities, but in Windows
they’d be the same.

These are just a couple “bugs” I found. They’re not a problem as long as
the programming that goes into using the FAT32 partition has enough logic to
avoid these problems (which isn’t hard at all). But to be FAT32 happy (more
like Windows happy), they’re just a couple things that could create
problems.

Ron

2

Previously, Ron Cococcia wrote in qdn.public.qnx4:

I narrowed it down to REM (QNX’s Fatfsys allowed the directory “R.E.M.” to
be made). In Windows, it doesn’t like directories with trailing periods
(why?!?! I think I should be allowed to make one with one if I want!).
Anyway, I tested this in Windows by making a directory “R.E.M.” and it
immediately threw away the last period.

Windows long file names are a superset of the original “8.3” file names.
A pure 8.3 file name has no period in the text of the file name. I assume
that for a long file name with 3 or less letters beyond the last period,
Windows treats the last three digits as an extension, and removes the
period.

So yes this probably is a bug, in Fatfsys, but a minor and easily
correctable one from a user stand point. Just use QNX to rename
the file.

Another is how two paths with the same name but capitalization is different
(Bush vs. BUSH) are recognized as two separate entities, but in Windows
they’d be the same.

Again, with 8.3 name, capitalization is ignored. I believe that for
long names it does matter, or at least Windows stores the entered
name with caps and lowercase. There may be programs that ignore
case when comparing. This of course creates a lot of problems for
a QNX like file system where case always matters.

\

Mitchell Schoenbrun --------- maschoen@pobox.com