Guy Harrison wrote:
> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>
>> Arguably, the most fundamental part of an operating system is file
>> handling. Windows beyrays me constantly and I seek solutions and
>> justification/defence in the name of Windows.
>>
>> First of all, on a Windows 98 laptop, I was able to copy a file with one
>> unicode character within. I am unable to delete it though; scandisk
>> cannot help either. In Windows 2000 (a different machine), I have a
>> filename whose path is deep (long) and, again, I am unable to erase it
>> and this causes a great deal of clutter.
>
> "dir /x" might help ("dir /?" for terse help). You ought to be able to
> specify the shortname if one exists. IIRC that'll be the case for names
> longer than 8+3 (DOS) and fingers crossed may apply for the (16bit)
> unicode characters.
I thought about doing this, but the operating system thinks the file is in
fact a directory. So, no way exists for treating that rotten element.
>> More annoyingly, I virtually spent 3 days trying to make a backup from
>> one Windows machine to another. It turned out that transfer protocols do
>> not cater for paths exceeding a certain size (what the heck??). This
>> never ever happened on old distributions of Linux that I use.
>
> Peter covered this.
>
>> Can anybody advise? Am I being harsh? Windows has cost me a lot of time,
>> so how can I not rant about it? The new Microsoft mantra is "It just
>> works", but quite frankly, it often doesn't.
>
> If you've not heard of it... visit www.cygwin.com for a unix environment
> under NT based systems. It's "package based" so via using their
> 'setup.exe' you can choose to install as little or much as you like (even
> X). I dunno if Win98 is still supported or not. It *may* be the case their
> (say) 'tar' can deal with very long names. In any case you could cobble
> together a script to shorten the names prior to tar then expand them
> afterward.
>
> There's always knoppix. Personally I back up my windows partitions with
> 'dd' though I dare say that's too low level here.
Thanks for that. I installed Cygwin in the past, but it was not of much use.
I only use my Windows 98 laptop for storage (mobile storage), but as I need
back-ups of that storage, it is only pathname length that bothered me.
Compressing branches as I did to resolve the problem is not ideal. This
will ruin indexing of my data in the future, which is what I sought a
workaround.
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz
http://Schestowitz.com
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