Re: path name limits

On Fri, 25 Oct 2002, Matthias Paul wrote:

> On 2002-10-23, Bart Oldeman wrote:
>
> >> What are tha path name limits imposed on freedos? MS-DOS has 66
> >> and DR-DOS has 63, I need a few more :(.

This wasn't me.

> >
> > Any _DOS_ (should) limits _path_ to 67 characters and name to 8.3
> > characters. This gives 67+\+8+.+3=80 characters for full path.

And this wasn't me.

I wonder how you got Arkady and me confused. As if we were the same
person and me having had lots of discussions with my alter ego :)
Did you do the quoting manually?

> I just noticed a slight difference between DR-DOS 7.03 and plain
> MS-DOS 7.10. Under DR-DOS, when you're inside the following directory
>
> C:\1\2\3\4\5\6\7\8\9\0\1\2\3\4\5\6\7\8\9\0\1\2\3\4\5\6\7\8\9\0\1\2\> MD 3
>
> still works fine, but a subsequent
>
> C:\1\2\3\4\5\6\7\8\9\0\1\2\3\4\5\6\7\8\9\0\1\2\3\4\5\6\7\8\9\0\1\2\> CD 3
>
> does not. Under plain MS-DOS, the "MD 3" gets rejected already.

Chkdsk should complain too.

[...]
> any file or directory can have a password, access rights, and
> ownership associations assigned to it. The password and the
> corresponding access rights are stored encrypted in some
> of the ten reserved entries in the directory entries in the
> filesystem (maybe we could add this to the FreeDOS kernel
> as well at some later stage, at least optionally),

The 10 reserved bytes are not reserved anymore -- they are used as
access/creation times and dates by various FAT filesystems and documented
in the MS specification.

About file passwords. Are they truely secure? One would have to encrypt
the file itself too, as far as I can see, because otherwise, given the
nature of DOS as a real mode OS it will always be possible to circumvent
it using BIOS int13 (and if DRDOS hooks the BIOS you could just change
the int13 vector to use the original int).

Bart