Re: using FAT floppies- a drawback

[Jiri Baum <jiri@baum.com.au>]

Hello,

Pollywog:
> I was going about reformatting a floppy disk I use to backup my Exim
> filters and configs and I remembered something:  DOS floppies are limited
> to 8.3 type names.  I believe there are some ways around this

umsdos - unix filesystem on top of MS DOS - that way you'll be able to read
the files from a DOS machine. (There'll be an extra file visible in DOS,
which contains the permissions/ownerships/long names.) Be careful when
changing this under DOS - umssync can handle most changes, but replacing a
something (eg a softlink) with something of the same name but completely
different type (eg a directory) can mess things up no end.

vfat - win95 filesystem - provides long filenames but nothing else

You could also use tar (or one of its siblings) and write the tar.gz file
on an msdos-formatted floppy (as .tgz) or directly onto the raw device.


Jiri