[syslinux] [PATCH 1/1] COM32: Add stub functions for directories

H. Peter Anvin hpa at zytor.com
Wed Oct 29 17:47:46 PDT 2008


Gene Cumm wrote:
> 
> I may be trying to oversimplify the code in my head but it would seem
> that file/directory matching is essentially iterating through a
> directory extraction then testing to see if the extracted filename
> matches the filename that you are searching for, stopping the
> iteration if found or continuing the iteration if not.
> 

It is, sort of, but the sad thing is that matching and extracting in a
way that is accessible to the user are actually two fairly different
operations when you're dealing with oddball character sets or
filesystems with weird formatting rules.  VFAT is the worst, by far, in
this respect.

> When I said that it seemed like the functions exist to do the
> directory operations, I misused functions and should have said that
> the code exists.  The pieces of code to be able to understand the
> filesystem are there but possibly not in a usable manner to be used by
> such a group of functions and API calls.

That's more of the issue.  I'm not saying they are hugely hard to write
(modulo character conversion problems), but there is certainly room for
ugly surprises.

	-hpa





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