[ILUG] Copying between ext3 and vfat

[Brian Foster]

  | From: Kevin Philp <kevin at cybercolloids.net>
  | Date: Wed, 17 Aug 2005 10:46:02 +0100
  | 
  | My understanding is that:[ ... ]
  | vfat - neither case sensitive or case preserving

 Not quite.  VFAT LFNs are care preserving (albeit
 not all software is!).  But you are 100% correct
 that VFAT filenames are not case sensitive; i.e.,
 “Foo”, “FOO”, “fOo”, and “foo” are the same file.

  | So if I copy a directory from an ext3 volume to a vfat
  | volume will I get into problems with files that differ
  | only in the case of their filenames?

 YES.
 In addition, certain characters will cause
 problems (i.e., are illegal), including (but
 not necessarily limited to) backslash (`\')
 and colon (`:').  And _then_, in addition,
 there are a small set of names which are not
 allowed (c.20 in total?), such as `NUL'.

 The only good news is VFAT LFNs are UTF-16;
 i.e., yer not restricted to an ASCII subset.
 Except as per above, any Unicode(/UCS)
 character is Ok. IIRC, the case insensitivity
 applies only to US-ASCII letters ([a-zA-Z]).

 There are various Linux mount(8) options to
 deal with some of these things (i.e., allow
 them), but you want to _avoid_ those options,
 especially if Windross will also be used to
 access the filesystem. (IIRC, the manual page
 calls many of the options “misguided”; and
 they are not default.)

cheers!
	-blf-
-- 
Experienced (20+ yrs) kernel/software Eng: | Brian Foster   Montpellier,
 • Unix, embedded, &tc;  • Linux;  • doc;  | blf at utvinternet.ie   FRANCE
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