Interoperability issue: Undocumented flag on NTFS directories allows or disallows translation of directory name and files within it

[Christopher R. Hertel]

On Tue, Aug 03, 2004 at 11:46:20AM +0200, Jonas Olsson wrote:
:
> *sigh* Some days you shouldn't get out of bed. 

I feel that way most days.  That's what laptops are for.  ;)

> We thought we checked all
> available file attributes but somehow we managed to overlook the read-only
> flag that was set on all directories where translation worked.
>
> A few lines of script later and I was able to verify that it was indeed
> the read-only flag on the directory that controls whether or not the
> directory and its contents are translated by desktop.ini entries.

Also check the System flag.  I've seen some instances in which read-only 
was *not* set but system was, and in those cases desktop.ini was 
processed.  I could be wrong, so your feedback would be of interest.

> The reason that xcopy didn't produce translating directories is of course
> that it doesn't preserve the read-only flags on directories. Neither does
> a Samba share.

Interesting stuff.  This is one of those unix-to-windows semantics
translation problems.  Given normal Unix semantics, I don't know of a
clean way to mimic the behavior outside of making use of extended 
filesystem features.

Chris -)-----

-- 
"Implementing CIFS - the Common Internet FileSystem" ISBN: 013047116X
Samba Team -- http://www.samba.org/     -)-----   Christopher R. Hertel
jCIFS Team -- http://jcifs.samba.org/   -)-----   ubiqx development, uninq.
ubiqx Team -- http://www.ubiqx.org/     -)-----   crh at ubiqx.mn.org
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