Date:	04 Feb 1993 01:53:42 -0400 (EDT)
From:	BHIMOFF AT COLGATEU DOT BITNET
Subject:	Re: mapping long names to 8.3 names
To:	djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu

Regarding the Discussion of symbolic links in DOS:

        The use of symbolic links whould not be a problem for temporary files
and for use by experienced programmers, but disk checking software such as
Norton disk doctor or chkdsk would remove any symbolic links as errors.

        I tried to implement links a year ago. It was great, but the minute I
ran Norton, It decided that all the links were file system errors and wanted to
correct them. I knew exactly what the problem was, but end users would not have
a clue as to what was going on. If the user didn't really understand this they
would be in trouble. Such software could not be distributed.

        I'm not sure if there is a way around this without some sort of device
driver to handle the links. Maybe one could store the names of the linked files
in a hidden file and have the device driver handle the returning of the a
file pointer to the original copy of the file by intercepting all file system
requests to DOS, but this would be a messy way of going about it.

Brandon Himoff

- Raw text -