Application Programs and the HPFS

Each of the OS/2 releases thus far have carried with them a major discontinuity for application programmers who teamed their trade in the MS-DOS environment. In OS/2 1.0, such programmers were faced for the first time with virtual memory, multitasking, inter-process communications, and the protected mode restrictions on addressing and direct control of the hardware and were challenged to master powerful new concepts such as threading and dynamic linking. In OS/2 Version 1.1, the stakes were raised even fufiher. Programmers were offered a powerful hardware-independent graphical user interface but had to restructure their applications drastically for an event-driven environment based on objects and message passing. In OS/2 Version 1.2, it is time for many of the file- oriented programming habits and assumptions carried forward from the MS-DOS environment to fall by the wayside. An application that wishes to take full advantage of the HPFS must allow for long, free-form, mixed-case filenames and paths with few restrictions on punctuation and must be sensitive to the presence of EAs and ACLs.

After all, if EAs are to be of any use, it won't suffice for applications to update a file by renaming the old file and creating a new one without also copying the EAs. But the necessary changes for OS/2 Version 1.2 are not tricky to make. A new API function, DosCopy, helps applications create backups--it essentially duplicates an existing file together with its EAs. EAs can also be manipulated explicitly with DosQFileInfo DosSetFileInfo DosQPathlnfo and DosSetPathInfo. A program should call DosQSysInfo at run time to find the maximum possible path length for the system and ensure that all buffers used by DosChDir DosQCurDir and related functions are sufficiently large. Similarly the buffers used by DosOpen DosMove DosGetModName, DosFindFirst D DosFindNext and like functions must allow for longer filenames. Any logic that folds cases in filenames or tests for the occurrence of only one dot delimiter in a filename must be rethought or eliminated. The other changes in the API will not affect the average application. The functions DosQFileInfo DosFindFirst and DosFindNext now retain all three sets of times and dates (created last accessed last motified) for a file on an HPFS volume but few programs are concerned with time and date stamps anyway. DosQFslnfo is used to obtain volume labels or disk characteristics just as before and the use of DosSetFsInfo for volume labels is unchanged. There are a few totally new API functions such as DosFsCtl (analogous to DosDevlOCtl but used for communication between an application and an FSD) DosFsAttach (a sort of explicit mount call) and DosQFsAttach (determines which FSD owns a volume) these are intended mainly for use by disk utility program. In order to prevent old OS/2 applications and MS-DOS applications running in the DOS box from inadvertently damaging HPFS files a new flag bit has been defined in the EXE file header that indicates whether an application is HPFS-aware. If this bit is not set the application will only be able to search for open or create files on HPFS volumes that are compatible with the FAT' file system's 8.3 naming conventions. lf the bit is set OS/2 allows access to all files on an HPFS volume because it assumes that the program knows how to handle long free-form filenames and will take the responsibility of conserving a file's EAs and ACLs.

< [Fault Tolerance] | [HPFS Home] | [Summary] > [Summary/PNG] >

Html'ed by Hartmut Frommert