Re: [mtools] Some improvements I would like to see in mtools.

[Alain Knaff]

First, sorry for the slow reply. After a disk crash last spring, I
have been rather busy, and am only now getting around to my backlogged
e-mails...

On Thursday 10 October 2002 08:25, Fredrik Stax{ng wrote:
> I have been using mtools for a while, mainly to create and examine
> boot floppy images for dosemu and vmware. I have found that the
> following changes would make it much easier to use mtools for
> this purpose:
>
> 1. An option to specify image file name on the command line. I have
>    implemented this.

As this part of your patch was not included in your e-mails, I just
implemented this independantly in mtools-3.9.8-20021102:

There is now a -i flag by which you can specify an image file (I did
not use your suggestion of -F, as this was already in use by mformat
for a different purpose).

The "command line" drive's letter is a colon.

Thus, the following would copy the file test.txt from the image file
myimage.bin to the floppy drive:

mcopy -i myimage.bin ::test.txt a:


> 2. A way to disable vfat entries. The MTOOLS_NO_VFAT does not seem
>    to work correctly.

What exactly is missing?

> 3. Traditionally, short dos file name have always been represented on
>    unix as lower case. This is how fat/iso9660 drivers and networking
>    software like samba and pc-nfs does it. That is, on extraction
>         MAKEFILE.  -> makefile
>         T.C        -> t.c
>         CONFIG.SYS -> config.sys
>    On insertion, if the filename consist of 8+3 lower case letters,
>    no vfat entry is made, and the filename is upcased.
> 4. It would be good if the FreeDOS boot sector could be built into
>    mformat, assuming that it can boot the msdos files also.

Could anybody mail me an image of this boot sector? Then I'll use this
as the default boot sector program, rather than the current program,
which just transfers control over to the hard disks MBR.

> 5. For me, a tarlike interface would be most convienent.
>         mtools x ../boot.img
>    Put the boot sector in .bootsect.
>         mtools c ../boot2.img
>    Mformat a 1.44 image, put the in the bootsect .bootsect, put
>    in io.sys, msdos.sys, drvspace.bin command.com etc, in that
>    order if present in the directory, hide those that should be hidden,
>    the put in the rest of the files.
>    For harddisk images, the a (add/replace) would be used more often.
>    This point is last, because it's note really that important. I can
>    write a script to do this.

IMHO, such functionality would be best implemented in shell script
wrappers around mcopy or mdir.

>
> I have attached the patch below. I am willing to make changes if the
> conding style etc, does not suit you.

Unfortunately, it seemed as if some parts of it were missing...

Alain

_______________________________________________
mtools mailing list
address@hidden
http://www.tux.org/mailman/listinfo/mtools