Re: ARIN Policy on IP-based Web Hosting

[David Charlap <david.charlap () marconi com>]

David Greer wrote:
> I think you are confusing MAC's and DOS here.  My recollection is that
> DOS stored filenames in 11 contiguous characters without the ".".  It
> being assumed that the last three characters were the extension.

No.  It is an 8-byte field and a 3-byte field.  The fact that these
fields are adjacent to each other in the structure does not transform
them into a single 11-byte field.

Note that when the name is less than 8 characters, the name field is
padded with NULLs, and the extension remains stored in the same place
(bytes 9-11, relative to the first byte of the name).

> Macintoshes did / do store the extension as a separate entity in the
> structure.

Macs don't have any concept of extensions whatsoever.  File type
information is stored completely separately and has nothing at all to do
with filenames.  The system shell (and most applications) do not give
users the ability to view or alter the four-byte file-type codes.

-- David