NWFS mangled name algorithm.

[Elrond]

On Wed, Mar 29, 2000 at 12:44:45AM +1000, John E. Malmberg wrote:
[...]
> The only reason this problem appears less frequently in a pure Microsoft is
> that the short file name is an attribute of the file.  In fact, it seems
> that the short file name is the true name of the file, and the long file
> name is the attribute.

For vfat, this is true. The long filenames are just stored
in the directory-list after the shortnames as an extension
to them.

> One user that I know of, managed to create two directories with the name
> "Delete me test" on an NT share.  The 8.3 filenames were unique, but the
> long file names were identical, including case!  The only way to delete the
> directory was from a DOS cmd window using the 8.3 short name.
[...]

I highly guess, he was running nt on vfat and not ntfs.

AFAIK ntfs is the other way round: You normaly have long
names and the short names are just an "attribute" (the ntfs
filesystem in Linux can present them as hardlinks. Oh: and
ntfs also has hardlinks on its own, which nobody tells you
loudly.).

There's even a switch to turn of 8.3-filename-generation.
If you only have nice 32bit apps, you can do so, cause they
should support long names. If you have old apps, they wont
even see the files with long names (AFAIK, haven't tested)

So I think, you can't have the same long name on ntfs
(unless you break the filesystem). and on vfat that
shouldn't happen either.


    Elrond