ESIX and BSD filesystem

[Bob Willcox]

In article <9194 at sail.LABS.TEK.COM> keithe at sail.LABS.TEK.COM (Keith Ericson) writes:
> ... questions about use of ESIX's FFS filesystem ...

I have been using ESIX 5.3.2 Rev D on obiwan since last August with an
Ultrastor ULTRA 12(F) ESDI controller and two Maxtor 4380E's with
virtually no problems.  Note that this is for *all* of the filesystems
on the system.

With the help of a patch (32BETA2) from ESIX's bbs and articles posted
by Chin Fang (fangchin at elaine41.stanford.edu) and Mike Burg
(mburg at unix386.Convergent.COM) I have now converted all but my root
filesystem to use long file names (default from ESIX is for System V
directory format).  So far (still early) everything seems to work as
expected.  I have not noticed any truncation of filenames by the
standard system utilities as you described (the patch does not change
any of these, it only replaces the /etc/conf/pack.d/ffs/* files).  I
did have to rebuild rcs and compress with some (minor) modifications so
that they no longer thought filename lengths were limited to 14
characters.  Also, some of the GNU fileutils that I had previously
built were broken (e.g., ls) so I rebuilt them as well.

One of the changes that I made was to /etc/ffs/newfs to remove its use
of the -S flag when invoking /etc/ffs/mkfs (as per Chin Fang's
comments).  Now whenever I make a ffs filesystem with newfs it makes it
with the BSD directory format (which, of course, is what I want so long
as it works).  I did this on both my harddisk and boot floppys.

>
>HOWEVER (you saw this coming, right) not everything works like it used to.
>The 'ls' command, by itself, spits out the directory contents.  But piping the
>output of ls to anything (ls | cat) creates filenames truncated to 11
>characters.  Use of wild cards is broken:
>
>	$ touch file1
>	$ touch file2
>	$ touch file1a
>	$ touch file1b
>	$ ls file1*
>	  file not found
>
>Piping ls into cpio results in cpio having no filenames handed to it.

All of this works correctly on my system.

>
>Anyone know what's going on?  Should I go back to FFS?

My experience so far has been positive...your mileage may vary.

>
>(help *) KEITHE()

-- 
Bob Willcox             ...!{rutgers|ames}!cs.utexas.edu!romp!rancor!bob
Phone: 512 258-4224