History of 00INDEX files

[zim]

Hello all,

Several years ago, I inhereted part of the funet ftp archive. The
archive was setup where each directory contained exactly one 00INDEX
file containing the raw file names, and a short description of each
file. Later, a perl script was written that generates index.html
files from them... all before me, however.

My question is: what purpose did/do 00INDEX files serve? Is there any
reason (and I do mean ANY reason-- good or bad) I shouldn't ditch them
and just maintain the index.html files directly?

I'm convinced that whatever answer is behind this is tied to unix
antiquity, which is why I ask here. Thanks for any response unix
gurus...

- Bo

[André Gillibert]

Doing a Web search, I found this page that may help you:
<http://blogs.iis.net/robert_mcmurray/archive/2009/09/05/creating-recursive-directory-listing-files-for-ftp-clients.aspx>

So, it looks like 00INDEX and ls-lr.txt files are designed to be read by human and contain the ftp server index, with file names and descriptions, in order to inform the user of the server contents which is useful when file names are short and not self-descriptive as was usual in the good old days of UNIX V7 which had 14 chars max file name lengths.
ls-lr.txt is there to avoid the overhead of a full recursive ls.

In other words, index.html seems to serve the same purpose than 00INDEX, and generating index.html from 00INDEX looks fine to me.
The ls-lr.txt HTTP+HTML equivalent would be a "site map" page.

The name 00INDEX, obviously, is designed to be top in directory listings.

That's all I was able to grab about the story of 00INDEX... Maybe some old ftp servers or clients treated it in a special way. I don't know.

There seems to be software that automatically generates these files in some cases:
<http://www.vadvbbs.com/bugs/view.php?id=24>

--
André Gillibert