Seems like treatment of NTFS ADS (foo:bar) changed between 1.5 and 1.7 but not mentioned in What's Changed

Thomas Wolff towo@towo.net
Tue Nov 17 17:09:00 GMT 2009


Christopher Faylor wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 04:03:14PM +0100, Thomas Wolff wrote:
>   
>> Christopher Faylor wrote:
>>     
>>> On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 03:55:43PM +0100, Thomas Wolff wrote:
>>>   
>>>       
>>>> Thomas Wolff wrote:
>>>>     
>>>>         
>>>>>> ...
>>>>>>             
>>>> Anyway, maybe some syntax could be found that would not be too harmful 
>>>> to become "reserved" for this purpose...
>>>> <end:of:rationale:for:weird:feature>
>>>>     
>>>>         
>>> Sorry but I agree with Corinna.  On linux/UNIX you can create a file
>>> with a colon in it.  We can now do this in Cygwin 1.7 and that's a good
>>> thing.  Complicating the path handling to deal specially with colons in
>>> a filename doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
>>>   
>>>       
>> Sorry that I take this up once more (after promising <end:of>), but I 
>> had this additional idea after seeing your point about being strictly 
>> consistent with the POSIX pathname namespace:
>>
>> So what about using "/" as a delimiter? If "foo" is a file, "foo/bar" is 
>> not a legal pathname in POSIX, so it could be used to access the "bar" 
>> fork of "foo" without causing real harm. There might be stronger 
>> objection to implicitly creating a fork with this syntax than to just 
>> accessing it, which could be resolved with either a $CYGWIN-configurable 
>> option or a mkfork command.
>>     
>
> How could we possibly use '/' as a delimiter?  Are you really advocating
> that we treat every file as a potential directory?  So every time
> someone says "foo/bar" and "foo" is a file we try to open "foo:bar"?
> And what happens when someone says "ls -l foo"?  Should that work too?
>   
I'm not really "advocating" it, it's just an idea how it could be 
handled in case support *is* desired.
And yes, if someone *wants* access to this NTFS feature, why not this 
way? It's a trade-off - weird (but acceptable) handling for a  weird 
feature.

Whether the default for ls is to show forks or not, might be 
configurable again. If it does (maybe with -l or -a or -la), it could 
look like:
... foo
... foo/bar
so it should not pretend a virtual directory structure here.

Thomas

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