Hi,

On Sun, May 31, 2026 at 8:01 PM Karen Lewellen via Freedos-user
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I am running an enhanced edition of ms dos 7.1.

I would doubt that it's much (if any) different from the official
release(s). But maybe someone disassembled or patched something.

> That includes its own lfn option, what specifically is dos lfn?

Win95 added an API for longer filenames up to 255 chars. (DJGPP 2.0
[GCC for DOS using DPMI] supported those out of the box.) Normally DOS
is restricted to 8.3, which many people (including developers) still
find restrictive. But so-called "long file names" (LFNs) only work
under the Win95 GUI, not under MS-DOS 7 proper.

DOSLFN.COM is a TSR that allows real DOS (like FreeDOS) to create and
find such "long file names" in a compatible way. (It's some weird hack
where DOS misuses the volume attribute for separate pieces of the file
name.)

HPFS from OS/2 was an improved file system (i.e. better than FAT), so
I always dreamed that FreeDOS would support it. But despite supporting
LFNs and being more efficient, you're still limited to 2 GB max file
size, and it's not journaled (thus still needing periodic file system
checks upon improper shutdown), so people weren't majorly interested.
Not enough of an improvement, I guess. (FreeBSD used to support it,
but I don't know if they ever added it back after making their file
system code reentrant.) Apparently OS/2 eventually moved to JFS
(journaled file system) to overcome such limitations.


_______________________________________________
Freedos-user mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user

Reply via email to