goer@sophist.uucp (Richard Goerwitz) (02/22/90)
A few weeks ago I saw a few messages about mapping long BSD file names to 14-character SysV-usable ones. My immediate reactions was to think, "Gee, any piece of software that uses long file names isn't written for portability. Don't waste your time." Golly gee. Guess who had to de-tar a big archive full of overlong file names the other day. In order to do this, I had a choice of either renaming each file by hand, and then burrowing through the source, or else writing some sort of utility that would, in utero, perform the necessary conversions. Naturally, I opted for the latter. What I have is a simple program that reads a tar file once through, looking at all of the headers to see if there are overlong file names, and forming a list of them. On the second pass, all the header blocks are rewritten with new checksums, lengths, and filenames, and all occurrences in the text of the filenames in question are rewritten (i.e. mapped to 14-char lengths) as well. The program is written in Icon, and I'll be happy to pass it on to anyone who wants it. Icon, in case anyone is interested, is the suc- cessor to Snobol4, and is a full-featured, procedurally oriented pro- gramming language that is implemented on a wide variety of processors (mainly in C). It can be ftp'd from cs.arizona.edu. I have no connection with the Icon-project except in feeling a certain amount of awe that one can still get it for free. -Richard L. Goerwitz goer%sophist@uchicago.bitnet goer@sophist.uchicago.edu rutgers!oddjob!gide!sophist!goer