Re: Most compatible way to prepare USB stick

[tomas@tuxteam.de]

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On Fri, Oct 21, 2016 at 10:51:54AM +0200, Nicolas George wrote:
> Le decadi 30 vendémiaire, an CCXXV, tomas@tuxteam.de a écrit :
> > > So there is a major difference in the way Linux and windows handle
> > > file naming. The file names look the same on both Linux and windows,
> > > but behind the scenes they are not.
> > You'd need more evidence to convince me of that. Among other things,
> > fat (and even the Rube-Goldbergian vfat) are stable since long, and
> > (by current standards) relatively simple.
> 
> There is a major difference in filenames between Linux and Windows, though.
> 
> For Linux, a filename is an arbitrary sequence of octets, with only two
> values forbidden: 0x00 used as a string terminator, and 0x2F, used a
> directory separator. Translating these sequence into printable string is
> entirely up to the applications, with most applications having converged to
> UTF-8 nowadays.
> 
> For Windows, a filename is a sequence of Unicode code points, encoded in
> various ways: sometimes as UTF-16, sometimes as a legacy 8-bits encoding,
> sometimes as UTF-8 masquerading as a legacy 8-bits encoding. On the sectors
> of a VFAT device, I think it is UTF-16.
> 
> Since VFAT is a Windows filesystem, Linux has to adapt to handle it, this is
> the role of the various nls_* kernel modules.

This is correct. There's even more to it -- Windows is kinda case-insensitive
(kinda: it can write upper and lower case, but it doesn't differentiate,
a good way to inadvertently overwrite a file :)

But all of this doesn't make a file system corrupt. It can produce funny
file names, though.

regards
- -- t
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