make DOS a filesystem?

[Alex Martelli]

Submitted-by: staff at cadlab.sublink.org (Alex Martelli)

jfh at rpp386.cactus.org (John F. Haugh II) writes:
	...
>I believe what is being referred to is use of the file system switch
>to support MS/DOS filesystems without the use of special tools or
>emulators.  SCO Xenix has a collection of commands which are
>intimately familiar with the format of MS/DOS file systems.  Thus,

Interactive 2.2 has both the collection-of-tools (actually bundled
into one, "dossette", which you can run either interactively or not),
AND the ability to mount a DOS partition or floppy (it seems that
for some reasone you can only mount a DOS partition on a hard disk if
that disk ALSO has a Unix partition - don't know if it's a bug or a
feature) with the mount -f DOS switch (or mount's auto-fs-sensing
feature).  It seems a reasonable approach; the special purpose tool
is faster for typical usage (grab a few files of a floppy), mounting
allows full-range operation.  There IS a bug in mounting a DOS12
partition - if you have more than 64 files in a directory, there
will be malfunctions (severe ones!); it's also indispensable to
up the NDOSINODES undocumented variable (as I believe Conor showed
a few months ago) from its default, currently 400.

-- 
Alex Martelli - CAD.LAB s.p.a., v. Stalingrado 45, Bologna, Italia
Email: (work:) staff at cadlab.sublink.org, (home:) alex at am.sublink.org
Phone: (work:) ++39 (51) 371099, (home:) ++39 (51) 250434; 
Fax: ++39 (51) 366964 (work only; any time of day or night).

Volume-Number: Volume 21, Number 170