rmtodd@uokmax.uucp (Richard Michael Todd) (07/12/90)
xanthian@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@chinet.chi.il.us or rmtodd@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu