The Windows NT Long File Name Project Home Page

Windows NT LFN Project

Background

Well, my work decided that we had to upgrade our desktop systems to Windows NT from Windows 95. Long File Names are IMHO a good thing so I thought I might work on it. My division develops windows software so I had access to all the needed tools (compiler, device driver development kit, debugger). I started work on it about October of 1997 and released the first version to the public in January 98. Since then I haven't really touched it until now.

News

October 7 1998 - OK - I think have have the df -hT problem figured out. Basically, the Win32 API is a piece. Well, more accurately, the DOS API is really bizarre, and Win32 didn't duplicate it. For some reason, in order to get the volume label on a disk in dos you call findFile with like c:\*.* and then tell it to only find volume labels (I think the volume label is actually a special kind of file). Well, the Win32 findFile function doesn't allow attribute based searches at all. So, I need to trap in the win32 find to see if we are looking for volume labels and then call a special getVolumeLabel. Yuck.
October 2 1998 - The end user package had an old version of the TSR is it. Thanks to Grigoriy Strokin for pointing this out. I'm uploading a new version. The developer package was OK.
October 1 1998 - It really is october 1 now. I've been able to reproduce the "out of environment problem" and will be attempting to figure it out soon. On my system I can occasionally create one new variable "set FOO=bar" but most (90%) of the time it fails. No idea why this would be happening though.
October 1 1998 - OK, its actually still the 30th but I named the zip files 10/01. No big or changes or anything but there should be two separate downloads available now. The end user file is really tiny (~15K). Also, Happy Birthday to me. Big 25.
September 29 1998 - Coming soon, a recompile with the separate end user and developer packages.

Downloads

There are two forms of the package available. Both of them include a working compiled LFN driver. The Debug Source and Binary Package is the 'developer' release. It includes full source code, as well as binaries compiled with DEBUG defined and with diagnostic messages. The stripped binary package just includes the binaries without any DEBUG info (it will still report fatal problems, but no other messages).

NT LFN End User Binary Only Package, 14320 bytes, 1998-10-01
NT LFN Source and Debug Binary Developer Package, 67785 bytes, 1998-10-01

Support

Just fire off an email to me < andrewc@rosemail.rose.hp.com>

Known Problems

I haven't investigated all of these problems but will post all the details I have anyway.

Loading the TSR screws up regular LFN stuff and DOS Key (me)
pipes stop working after loading the TSR: C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32> ls / | less -c Write fault error writing device AUX Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail? (Eli)
after installing the TSR, you cannot modify the environment: it always says "Out of environment space". (eli)
df reports garbage. Note that even the names of the filesystems are not reported correctly (it reports the first file it sees there)(eli)
Less exits after showing the first screen (eli)
readdir returns file names from floppies written under plain DOS in UPPERCASE. (eli)
when my program ends: nt-lfn is still resident, and it causes an error message: "Invalid command.com... Cannot load command, system halted". (grigoriy)