M. Adam Davis wrote:

> If the name is 8.3 then both names are the same.  If the
> name is longer then the two names differ.

Note that there's a funny thing with this: the 8.3 name generated from the
LFN is not guaranteed to remain constant. Say you create a file
testtesttest.txt in an empty directory. Its SFN is now testte~1.txt. Now
create a file testte~1.txt -- this is possible. The SFN of the first file
is now testte~2.txt.


> So you're pretty much stuck if you remain with FAT32 or NTFS.  

Not necessarily...

> Lastly, I imagine someone, somewhere has created a "dir" type utility
> that you can restrict to long file name matches.

Right. If you want a cmd.exe like command line that has some extra
features, 4NT may help. You can tell it to match LFNs only, or both LFNs
and SFNs (for compatibility with cmd.exe).
http://www.jpsoft.com/help/index.htm?lfnsearch.htm

There may be others. It definitely is possible to write an enhanced dir
command that matches only LFNs with one of the many script languages
around.


> If you want to be really kludgy about it, rename all your files with a
> space in the second letter space of the name.  

Nice trick :)

> There may be other characters you can use as well, which will eliminate
> the need for the quotes. 

AFAIK, 8.3 FAT entries allow ASCII alphanumeric and ! # $ % & ' ( ) - @ ^ _
` { } ~

Anything else should force a LFN-only match. Invalid characters in LFN
names on NTFS are AFAIK < > : " / \ | ? *

So any character that's not in the first set and not in the second (eg.
'[') should do it. It doesn't even have to be the second character;
anywhere in the name (including the first character) is fine.


Maybe consider that talking about "DOS" is very ambiguous, talking about
"MS-DOS" when talking about the WinXP command line is wrong. While many
features are similar between the MS-DOS shell command.com (as used also in
Win9x) and the Win32 shell cmd.exe (as used in Win2k and WinXP), many are
different, and few if any features behave exactly the same.

Gerhard

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