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Using Samba, Second Edition
book

Using Samba, Second Edition

by Jay Ts, Robert Eckstein, David Collier-Brown
February 2003
Intermediate to advanced
560 pages
23h 11m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Using Samba, Second Edition

Name Mangling and Case

Back in the days of DOS and Windows 3.1, every filename was limited to eight uppercase characters, followed by a dot, and three more uppercase characters. This was known as the 8.3 format and was a huge nuisance. Windows 95/98/Me, Windows NT/2000/XP, and Unix have since relaxed this problem by allowing longer, sometimes case-sensitive, filenames. Table 8-4 shows the current naming state of several popular operating systems.

Table 8-4. Operating system filename limitations

Operating system

File-naming rules

DOS 6.22 or below

Eight characters followed by a dot followed by a three-letter extension (8.3 format); case-insensitive

Windows 3.1 for Workgroups

Eight characters followed by a dot followed by a three-letter extension (8.3 format); case-insensitive

Windows 95/98/Me

255 characters; case-insensitive but case-preserving

Windows NT/2000/XP

255 characters; case-insensitive but case-preserving

Unix

255 characters; case-sensitive

Samba still has to remain backward-compatible with network clients that store files in just the 8.3 format, such as Windows for Workgroups. If a user creates a file on a share called antidisestablishmentarianism.txt, a Windows for Workgroups client cannot tell it apart from another file in the same directory called antidisease.txt. Like Windows 95/98/Me and Windows NT/2000/XP, Samba has to employ a special method for translating a long filename to an 8.3 filename in such a way that similar filenames will not cause collisions. ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596002564Catalog PageErrata