From owner-ntemacs-users@june Wed Jul 31 04:20:44 1996 X-VM-v5-Data: ([nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil] [nil "Wed" "31" "July" "1996" "11:10:52" "+0100" "Andrew Innes" "andrewi@harlequin.co.uk" nil "58" "Re: NTFS File Streams and EMACS..." "^From:" nil nil "7" nil nil nil nil] nil) Received: from joker.cs.washington.edu (joker.cs.washington.edu [128.95.1.42]) by june.cs.washington.edu (8.7.5/7.2ju) with SMTP id EAA04206 for ; Wed, 31 Jul 1996 04:20:43 -0700 Received: from june.cs.washington.edu (june.cs.washington.edu [128.95.1.4]) by joker.cs.washington.edu (8.6.12/7.2ws+) with ESMTP id EAA30999 for ; Wed, 31 Jul 1996 04:20:43 -0700 Received: from holly.cam.harlequin.co.uk (holly.cam.harlequin.co.uk [193.128.4.58]) by june.cs.washington.edu (8.7.5/7.2ju) with SMTP id DAA29040; Wed, 31 Jul 1996 03:11:51 -0700 Received: from propos.long.harlequin.co.uk by holly.cam.harlequin.co.uk; Wed, 31 Jul 1996 11:10:56 +0100 Received: from woozle.long.harlequin.co.uk (woozle [193.128.93.77]) by propos.long.harlequin.co.uk (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id LAA27110; Wed, 31 Jul 1996 11:10:52 +0100 Message-Id: <199607311010.LAA27110@propos.long.harlequin.co.uk> In-Reply-To: (message from Michael Hotchin on Tue, 30 Jul 1996 22:45:54 -0700) From: Andrew Innes To: mhotchin@microsoft.com Cc: voelker@cs.washington.edu, ntemacs-users@cs.washington.edu Subject: Re: NTFS File Streams and EMACS... Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 11:10:52 +0100 On Tue, 30 Jul 1996 22:45:54 -0700, Michael Hotchin said: >Apparently, NTFS partitions support the notions of having multiple >streams in a file, like so: [ foo contains "Boo!" in primary stream, and "Hi There" in stream "bar" ] >The file naming convention confuses EMACS, though. It seems that a file >name with a colon in it like this: > >e:\projects\OO7\tmp\foo:bar > >is interpreted as the file 'bar' on O:. All the rest is thrown away. > >This is using EMACS 19.30.1 (i386-*-nt-3.50), running on NT 4.0 build >1381. I wasn't aware there was a simple syntax for accessing file streams other than the primary one, but looking in the SDK docs it looks like this is true. The parsing of file names containing `:' was changed for 19.31 so that `:' is only considered to be part of a drive specifier if it is preceded by a single letter (either at the beginning of the string, or after a directory separator in some cases). So, from 19.31 onwards the file name itself will not be truncated by Emacs. It turns out that this is almost sufficient to allow Emacs to access other streams in an NTFS file. In fact, Emacs is able to *write* data to alternate streams (which can then be seen using the "more < foo:bar" trick in the shell), but Emacs seems unable to read alternate streams. For example, if I open the file d:/tmp/foo:bar, I end up with a new file which I can then save okay (and see the contents from the shell), but when I reopen the file, Emacs again thinks it is a new file. The reason is simply that Emacs first checks to see if the file exists before attempting to open it and read its contents (as does GetOpenFileName, apparently, since Notepad and other Win32 editors won't load the alternate stream either). More specifically, insert-file-contents calls stat() first to find out things like the file modification timestamp and to check that it is an ordinary file (this is more relevant for Unix, where the file might be a named pipe say, but the code is called on NT as well). I could modify the NT implementation of stat (Emacs has its own version to fix bugs in the MSVC version, and fake inode numbers) to understand the alternate stream syntax, but I'm not sure that pretending `file:stream' is a normal file in its own right is the right thing to do (it will still not appear in a directory listing, for instance). If you want to be able to edit alternate streams, you could write a bit of elisp that called (shell-command "more < file:stream" buffer), or some variation, to read the contents of the stream, and then set up the buffer file name etc as if the file had been loaded by find-file. Saving the buffer would not require any special action. AndrewI From owner-ntemacs-users@june Tue Jul 30 23:21:29 1996 X-VM-v5-Data: ([nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil] [nil "Tue" "30" "July" "1996" "22:45:54" "-0700" "Michael Hotchin" "mhotchin@microsoft.com" nil "38" "NTFS File Streams and EMACS..." "^From:" nil nil "7" nil nil nil nil] nil) Received: from joker.cs.washington.edu (joker.cs.washington.edu [128.95.1.42]) by june.cs.washington.edu (8.7.5/7.2ju) with SMTP id XAA08465 for ; Tue, 30 Jul 1996 23:21:29 -0700 Received: from june.cs.washington.edu (june.cs.washington.edu [128.95.1.4]) by joker.cs.washington.edu (8.6.12/7.2ws+) with ESMTP id XAA37389 for ; Tue, 30 Jul 1996 23:21:27 -0700 Received: from inet-01-imc.itg.microsoft.com (mail1.microsoft.com [131.107.3.41]) by june.cs.washington.edu (8.7.5/7.2ju) with SMTP id WAA05165; Tue, 30 Jul 1996 22:46:19 -0700 Received: by inet-01-imc.itg.microsoft.com with SMTP (Microsoft Exchange Server Internet Mail Connector Version 4.0.993.5) id <01BB7E68.DFD0EB10@inet-01-imc.itg.microsoft.com>; Tue, 30 Jul 1996 22:45:57 -0700 Message-ID: X-Mailer: Microsoft Exchange Server Internet Mail Connector Version 4.0.993.5 Encoding: 38 TEXT From: Michael Hotchin To: "'voelker@cs.washington.edu'" Cc: "'ntemacs-users@cs.washington.edu'" Subject: NTFS File Streams and EMACS... Date: Tue, 30 Jul 1996 22:45:54 -0700 Apparently, NTFS partitions support the notions of having multiple streams in a file, like so: E:\projects\OO7\tmp>echo Boo! > foo E:\projects\OO7\tmp>echo Hi There >> foo:bar E:\projects\OO7\tmp>ls E:\projects\OO7\tmp\*.* foo 7 (7) bytes in 1 files E:\projects\OO7\tmp>more < foo Boo! E:\projects\OO7\tmp>more < foo:bar Hi There E:\projects\OO7\tmp>ls E:\projects\OO7\tmp\*.* foo 7 (7) bytes in 1 files E:\projects\OO7\tmp> The file naming convention confuses EMACS, though. It seems that a file name with a colon in it like this: e:\projects\OO7\tmp\foo:bar is interpreted as the file 'bar' on O:. All the rest is thrown away. This is using EMACS 19.30.1 (i386-*-nt-3.50), running on NT 4.0 build 1381. Mike H. > >