Re: Commercial use of FreeDOS / BETA status and missing features

Sane wrote:

>On Sat, 2002-11-09 at 09:06, Aitor Santamaria Merino wrote:
>
>>>You can see LFN listings when in a DOS box, but not in plain DOS mode 
>>>for Win9x (I know this very well, as I use both quite regularly). 
>>>
>>Yes, this is because under V86 mode (when you run a DOS BOX) VFAT (I 
>>think) offers you LFN, but plain real mode DOS doesn't. But COMMAND.COM 
>>is the same file in both cases: it's just that LFN is not used whenever 
>>it is not detected :)
>>
>
>Technically you are correct, Win9x command com does fully support LFN.
>
>But in batch files I believe FOR and other things use the 8.3 format
>name, unless you specifically execute a command to enable long names. 
>This was done to maximize compatibility with old DOS batch files and 3rd
>party utilities that people converting from 6.22/Win3.1 to Win95 would
>have.  This was my main concern is that FreeCOM support such behavior as
>part of also supporting LFN.
>
If I understood correctly, you mean that %%n and %n would be cutted to 
shortfilename by COMMAND, that would make sense to preserve 
compatibility with older DOS programs that know nothing about LFNs.
For the contrary, I have checked that if you issue the following command 
for PROGRAM.EXE be a traditional 16-bit program,
C:\>PROGRAM   "My long file name.txt"
with NT's CMD.EXE, you get
"My
as first parameter. I don't know if this also happens for Win9X/ME 
COMMAND, but in such case, I would say this is an error, the desirable 
thing would be that  MYLONG~1.TXT is passed as first argument, am I right?

Aitor