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Re: Seems like treatment of NTFS ADS (foo:bar) changed between 1.5 and 1.7 but not mentioned in What's Changed


Corinna Vinschen wrote:
On Nov 16 12:56, Thomas Wolff wrote:
Andy Koppe wrote:
I'd suspect the support for ADSs in 1.5 was rather accidental anyway.
POSIX programs certainly don't know about them, and you get the rather
weird situation that "files" like foo:bar can be accessed but don't
show up in the directory they're in. Hence I think the right way to
access ADSs is via Windows tools. Unless there is a POSIXy way to
represent them?
I've only learned about this ADS stuff recently but yes, I think,
simply using the "a:b" syntax (which is also used by Windows tools)
and handling them as a virtual file is a quite obvious POSIX way to
do it.
So if it worked in 1.5, whether accidental or not, I think it should
continue to work in 1.7.

It's a deliberate change. It's more important to support as much POSIXy
filenames as possible than to access streams. I agree with Andy. Use
Windows tools to use them.
But with it being supported, "foo:bar" *is* a POSIX filename and can quite transparently be handled like a file, just that the underlying filesystem in some cases (i.e. if it is NTFS) maps it to a fork of some other file. So in practice, it *is* actually a file too, despite the fact that MS uses weird terminology and inconsistent tooling for it.
And since I read that the use cases for ADS may increase with future Windows versions, I just thought it should be a good idea not to ignore these files.
Moreover, this transparent mapping would also solve the copy/backup problem discussed in the other thread (was it "rsync"?) and actually all problems at once, like including these things in zip archives etc.


Thomas

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