Questions tagged [file-system]
For questions regarding file systems and software interfaces to them.
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Did VMS ever acquire filesystem cross-links?
Both Unix and Windows, quite early, acquired cross-links in their filesystems, such that the filesystems are not trees, but general directed graphs. I'm curious about whether this was an inevitable ...
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Since when does Windows support forward slash as path separator?
Historically, Windows used CR/LF and backslash, first for new lines, second for path separator.
But it turns out that it supports forward slashes as well:
Note that Windows supports either the ...
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Who invented file extensions in file names?
Do we know when and where the idea of adding a suffix to filenames was conceived? I have found a lot of information about the history of specific file formats, but I am curious about when the need for ...
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Do any FAT8 filesystem images survive?
According to Wikipedia, the original FAT8 filesystem was developed by Marc McDonald in 1977 or 1978, as part of "NCR BASIC +6", a port of Microsoft BASIC to an 8080-based NCR data entry ...
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Why does Windows still use FAT and NTFS for filesystems? [closed]
Why does Windows use FAT (designed in 1977) and NTFS (designed in 1993, last changed in 2001), which are relatively old filesystems? Is there some sort of technical reason they haven't been able to ...
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Origin of UNIX symbolic links?
When I search the web for information about the origin of UNIX symbolic links, I see "Symbolic links were first introduced into Unix with 4.1c-BSD". But when I go to fact check that, it ...
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How did ‘logically-sectored FAT’ work?
While browsing online materials about the FAT file system, I occasionally came across mentions of ‘logically-sectored FAT’. This was apparently some kind of special mode of formatting a hard drive, ...
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Which is the first version of DOS to support more than one reserved sector in a FAT file system?
I'm trying to fix a problem when trying to use DOS stuff on SSDs. The problem is sector alignment in an SSD is completely different from what DOS expects, and writes to FAT do funny things when the ...
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When was the term ‘directory’ replaced by ‘folder’?
I started using computers with MS-DOS and as far as I can remember the data structure holding files was called a directory (it held other directories as well), DIR is still used to list the content of ...
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Layout of pre-APM Apple partition map
Page 3-25 of Inside Macintosh: Devices describes the format of a partition map entry. The definition of the pmSig field says:
The partition signature. This field should contain the value of the ...
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Why does the FAT file system have separate ‘hidden’ and ‘system’ attributes?
File systems used by DOS and Windows have used file attribute bits as a relatively prominent feature. The first of them, FAT, exposes four attributes to the user: read-only, archive, hidden and ...
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What exactly did the "UNFORMAT" MS-DOS command do?
I found only this:
The UNFORMAT command is used to undo the effects of formatting a disk.
The command is available in MS-DOS versions 5 and later.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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Why would an implementation of getwd call mktemp?
As mentioned here the book Expert C Programming contains the claim that there was a bug in SunOS 4.0.3's version of lpr, (a printing program) caused by a custom mktemp function overriding the library ...
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Why was the DOS clock device renamed from CLOCK into CLOCK$?
From the Wikipedia article on reserved device names
... and the CLOCK$ (still named CLOCK in some issues of MS-DOS 2.11) clock device were introduced with DOS 2.0, ...
Why was is necessary to add a $...
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Origin of the 8.3 file names scheme
On microcomputers, the famously laughed 8.3 file names (by Amiga and Mac users!) were used by PC/MS-DOS, which in turn inherited this limit from CP/M. But why did Gary Kildall use this scheme of eight ...
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Why is MS-DOS not able to read partitions starting at logical sector 0?
When creating a FAT file system, mtools and newer versions of mkfs.fat write a stub MBR partition table to the boot sector. This makes the file system accessible when written directly to media that ...
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How was end-of-file stored on a Commodore 1541 disk? [duplicate]
On a VIC-20 or C-64, you could open a sequential file on a 1541, write exactly N bytes (say, 47 bytes) to it, then close it. Then you could open the same file for reading and start reading byte by ...
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What are the differences between MS-DOS and DR DOS FASTOPEN?
OS/2 Museum's history of DOS mentions the FASTOPEN.EXE TSR was introduced in DOS 3.3. Its entry on DOS 4.0 adds some implementation details.
It reminded me of the DR DOS FASTOPEN=nnnnn directive in ...
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How can I run OpenSSH under AmigaDOS?
I want to use OpenSSH for Amiga, copied ssh and other files to OS:Utilities from extracted archive, but I'm unable to run the binary. Tried to set protection but it didn't help either. How to make it ...
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Which operating systems supported the ECMA-58/ECMA-67/ECMA-91 floppy disk filesystem?
ECMA defined a filesystem for floppy disks which appears to take inspiration from the tape labels used on mainframe and minicomputer tape systems (note the use of "VOL1" and "HDR1" ...
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How did Commodore drives produce program listings from disk directories?
CBM BASIC 2.0 has no built-in command for listing the contents of a floppy disk. Instead, the usual way is to LOAD a pseudo-file named $ from the disk into memory. The file can then be LISTed like a ...
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Were there any filesystems support tag based key-value pairs before the 90s?
Attribute–value pair is quite common in programming languages, databases, URL query-strings, and Email/HTTP headers, which could also be used to organize, classify and version files.
Extended file ...
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When did files start to be dated?
When I revisit my files on a 5¼″ floppy using my 1541 drive with a C64 I mainly miss the date on files.
I know that a Real Time Clock was not implemented and that the first computer to integrate the ...
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How did 512 Bytes come to be the most common sector size?
It was long assumed by FS drivers that all diskette and harddisk units operate in blocks of size 512 Bytes. How did this happen to be the case, historically? Why not the "neater" 1 KiB, say?
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How do I get the size of a file on disk on the Commodore 64?
As the title, really. I'm reading a SEQ file into memory, and need to know how big it is ahead of time. I know that I can get the size in blocks by parsing the directory, although it's ugly, but the ...
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Why did MacOS Classic choose the colon as a path separator?
I mean, all other OSs that I know of use some form of slash as a path separator, so why did Apple choose the colon?
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How to identify the filesystem for an old SCSI drive?
Back in the day, SCSI was the way to go. I remember my high school having a single 5Mb Sider hdd connected to an Apple //e - which seemed awesome after endlessly swapping floppies. Not long after, I ...
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Where and when did the ".s" suffix for assembly-language source files originate?
The closest I was able to find on StackOverflow is What are .S files?, in which no answerer addresses why we use .s for assembly. (And .S for preprocessor/macro assembly; and gcc -S to produce ...
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Trying to create a filesystem ROM for Amstrad CPC but tape is still waiting
Some background: I want to create a CPC MicroSD interface, so my first step is trying to hook the CAS* jumpblock entries just like AMSDOS and other DOSes do.
My first goal is to override CAS CATALOG ...
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What was the first file system?
SoftwareEngineering.SE has a question about the historically first hierarchical file system (also a similar local question), but what was the first OS with a file system in general?
That is, what OS ...
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CF partitions not showing up in Workbench
4GB Compact Flash
KS 3.1 40.68
WB3.1
Latest WinUAE
I just created a Compact Flash (compatible Transcend) partitions under Workbench on latest WinUAE using this guide. Despite following the steps my CF ...
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How did the /dev file system work in early Unix?
UNIX did not have support for virtual file systems (vnodes) until 1986.
S.R. Kleiman, “Vnodes: An Architecture for Multiple File System Types in Sun UNIX,” Summer USENIX 1986
I remember this quite ...
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How do I know where the file directory is stored on a Spectrum +3 disk layout?
I'm trying to parse Spectrum +3 disk images. I only ever had a tape-based Speccy back in the day.
The +3 had a built-in floppy drive but was late to the party and not that successful. It had the same ...
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How did the Spectrum clones with TR-DOS and paged memory load and run code files from disk?
I've been playing with Spectrum emulators, their file formats and some reverse engineering tools recently.
Thanks to this forum, I was able to parse the TR-DOS disk image format and find the bytes of ...
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What are some early network file systems?
I know it's always hard to define an exact first, so I'll just ask about early network file systems. To be more specific, I'm wondering about file systems that transparently present directories and ...
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Is it a Directory, a List, or a Catalogue?
There are three common CLI commands on microcomputers that all mean the same thing: "Show me the contents of a volume, disk, or sub-directory". I will mention that the noun "Catalogue", and the ...
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Filesystems with versioning
I've been reading through The Unix Hater's Handbook. It has many, many very valid criticisms. (I'm still raging that terminal escape codes aren't in the terminal driver...)
There is one anomaly though:...
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Can't boot FAT32 larger than 2GB, unlike FAT16
Why can my PC not boot FAT larger than 2GB (FAT32) in legacy mode, but FAT16 and NTFS work fine?
It just gives me a non-system disk error, while booting the same (DOS boot disk) files under FAT16 ...
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Archimedes emulator "archie" PCFS file metadata format?
Archie, an older Archimedes emulator for DOS had a feature called "PCFS" that allowed Archimedes files to be stored on the filesystem of the machine running the emulator. The files themselves were ...
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Why does the single dot entry exist in file systems?
There is plenty of literature about its meaning, the current directory, but I would like to ask about why such thing do exist in first instance.
While CHDIR .. usefulness is obvious, i.e. go to the ...
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How to read Microware OS-9 RBF Filesystem under Windows / Linux?
I have a virtual disk image file os9000-xibase.img and Windows can't read it nor mount it.
With ImDisk Virtual Disk, I'm able to mount it, but not read it, because it is a Random Block File System ...
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How can I extract game data from Nitemare 3D files?
I am trying to reverse engineer an old Wolf3D style Dos game named "Nitemare 3D". I can get a raycasting engine with directional sprites running pretty easily using SDL2, but I have no experience with ...
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Single level file directory
Have there actually been any commercial operating systems with a single-level, limited capacity file directory? I remember vaguely that the early versions of MS-DOS FAT12 may have had a single layer, ...
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Why did ScanDisk exist?
As far as I can tell, CHKDSK has been part of DOS and Windows since day one. However, in later versions of DOS, CHKDSK was shipped along side ScanDisk. As of Windows 98, running CHKDSK will result in ...
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Patch BBC Master ROM using Sideways RAM?
I have a BBC Master 128 with the standard ROM installed. This includes ADFS v1.50 in slot "D". I want to replace this ADFS in ROM with a patched version, loaded from disk, into Sideways RAM. It is a ...
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Minimal DOS long filename driver
Am trying to run Latex + Emacs under DOS 5.0, and would currently seem to need long filenames. I have tried the DOSLFN driver but it prevents Emacs from running. I have 4 MB RAM in total.
Is there ...
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Where was the DOS cdd utility from?
I distinctly remember, on the computer I had in the 90's, being able to type cdd D:\bla\bla in the MS-DOS command prompt, to change both the current directory and drive (avoiding having to type D: ...
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First (3rd Party) Application-Agnostic Home Computer or OS for such
What was the first home computer and file system that allowed users to choose freely between 3rd party applications?
I was under the impression that early PC (manufacturer) bundled their own ...
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When did Multics begin using '>' as a pathname separator?
As described in this question, Multics used > as the separator between components in pathnames, and < as a parent directory indicator in relative paths.
However, an early paper describing the ...
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Why did Commodore files not include metadata to say where in memory to load it?
On the Commodore 64, (and I believe also the VIC-20, PETs etc.) you may instruct BASIC to
LOAD "something",8
to load a file to the start of BASIC's area (and that address may vary between machines),...
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