Re: [Offtopic] FAT filesystem specs and behaviour

Jukka Tapani Santala (e75644@UWasa.Fi)
Fri, 25 Sep 1998 16:46:20 +0300 (EET DST)


On Fri, 25 Sep 1998, Kenneth Albanowski wrote:
> I've forgotten!) compatability layer. I doubt those books describe how you
> can invoke some file services within a .COM program by calling an
> indirect function near the beginning of your segment, which is merely one
> of these holdovers. You could (and can) do several things with DCBs (is

I used to do that a whole lot, and always just assumed it was part of the
DOS system. It's in a number of books, too,but don't have the
reference-booksaround just now to check.

> I'm also half-willing to bet (but only half) that those references don't
> mention that DOS is willing to accept '/' as a path separator just about
> everywhere (regardless of the settings that controls what COMMAND.COM uses
> as path and argument separators.)

Actually, since I use a whole lot of *nixes, I often accidentally type /
instead of \ in various places. Not a single time has DOS / COMMAND.COM
accepted it. And I couldn't see how it could, because DOS uses / for it's
"switches".

> I also seem to recall that OS/2's "metadata-under-DOS" stuff used a file
> name of "EA DATA".

That was mentioned earlier, and a) Said that the "space" in there was most
likely something else(?) and b) It was there specifically so that it
couldn't be managed with MSDOS filesystem tools because it was specific to
OS/2.

-Donwulff

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