Files on fat16/32

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: Files on fat16/32
started by: humpty

Posted by humpty on April 08 2006,03:51

I'm thinking of wether I should take the plunge to have a persistent /home on my pendrive. I use backup/restore now because the gzip'ed file preserves lower/uppercase/ownerships ..etc of the files. This is important for my development files cos' a wrong case in any of them gives a compile error.

I'm asking anyone who has ever had any lower/upper case problems with linux files being on vfat , because I have on one or two occasions although I could not reproduce the results.
Once I could not change the first character of a directory to lower/upper case and several times I found everything had changed to
either lowercase or uppercase. This may have something to do with accessing files via windoze at the office, i'm not really sure.

anyfeed back is much appreciated.

Posted by 300c_pilot on April 08 2006,22:44

I have , Linux always has been case sensitive where windows does not care. One othe issue has been with the 8 character limits for file names (such as "proga~1" instead of "program files")

Becareful with windows long file names... sometimes I have corrupted them by copying or renaming under linux.
Smooth flights...:)

Posted by humpty on April 09 2006,04:27

Usually I don't touch any of my linux files in windoze, but somehow they are affected. The weirdest time was trying to
create a new directory in linux e.g' mydir', only to see the
result as 'Mydir' , no matter how I changed it under emelfm or
bash, it would always capitalize.???

Posted by 300c_pilot on April 09 2006,06:34

All your capital issues are taking place on vfat 32 only right, your not using Windows 95 are you?

Posted by humpty on April 17 2006,02:49

that's right.

Posted by mikshaw on April 17 2006,13:53

The uppercase/lowercase issue is only one annoyance. The biggest problem with any fat filesystem, in my opinion, is that it can't handle proper file permissions. Everything is executable, and there is no way to properly limit user access to files.
What this means to me is that fat is the worst choice to use for any part of a linux system, other than on a separate partition for data shared between Windows and Linux. I strongly suggest not using it for anything mounted outside of /mnt. Having a real linux filesystem for your persistent home will mean a little extra work if you want to share files with Windows, but as I see it you'll have fewer problems.

Posted by humpty on April 17 2006,23:40

Quote (mikshaw @ April 17 2006,09:53)

.. can't handle proper file permissions.

yes, I found that out too. it seems any file permissions are only honoured if they were originally copied from a linux partition otherwise it's 777 for any new file.

(hmm, maybe I should try create a third partition on the pendrive with ext2 and sacrifice the linux/windows compatibility? I think I remember there were utilities for windows to see ext2

)