Short filenames and patch (was Re: Lots of heat, little light. (was: Unnecessary tar-compress-uuencodes)
Richard Michael Todd
rmtodd at uokmax.uucp
Thu Jul 12 04:01:05 AEST 1990
xanthian at zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) writes:
>>[...] my next release of the ACS will be in the form of shar files. As an
>>added bonus, all of the filenames will be under 14 characters in this
>>one.
>As a newbie to one of the systems that causes this concern, I note that
>this isn't good enough. If you want to be able to issue patch files
>that work with "patch", you have to hold the file names down to 9 or fewer
>characters so that the ".orig" extensions patch creates are respected,
>rather than lost, making the original have the same name as, and therefore
>clobber/be clobbered by the patched version.
Uh, what version of patch are you running? On my system (which is cursed with
the System V Short Filenames From Hell), patch is smart enough to not try to
use ".orig" as the extension for the original file; instead it uses tilde.
It also uses "#" as the suffix for the reject files instead of ".rej". Hence
you only need restrict yourself to 13-character filenames. It probably would
be polite to restrict it slightly further, to 12 chars, in case the user wants
to keep his source under RCS or SCCS, which add 2 chars to the filename (",v"
at the end for RCS, "s." at the beginning for SCCS). Still, one hardly needs
to be so restrictive as to limit oneself to 9-character names.
--
Richard Todd rmtodd at chinet.chi.il.us or rmtodd at uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu
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