exFAT with OSX created filesystem symlink issue.

[Randall Mason]

I don't know if this is exactly an exFAT question, because I hopped between three different filesystems using two different OSs, but my guess is that there is a proprietary extension to exFAT by OSX.

I rsync'ed my home directory from a case-insensitive hfs+ filesystem on OSX to an OSX created exFAT partition.  I then plugged this into my debian ARM NAS and rsync'ed it to an ext[2, 3 or 4] filesystem.  I now have a bunch of files in my home directory that used to be symlinks that show up as regular files with the contents as specified in:
http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/UNIX_Extensions#Storing_symlinks_on_Windows_servers for Minshall+French symlinks.

It's not a big deal to go through and do a find for them, given the fixed size and the exact structure of the file, but I'm guessing it may help somebody else if this extension were included in exfat-fuse.  For every file that has the exact size of 1067, check for the structure and then spit out the symlink instead of the text file.  My guess is that since Microsoft states that exFAT doesn't have softlink capabilities, this is a proprietary OSX extension. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ee681827%28v=vs.85%29.aspx)

This could even be an optional switch on mount.

I'm not on the list, so please copy me on replies.  Thanks!

Randall Mason

clasht...@gmail.com

[Andrew Nayenko]

> It's not a big deal to go through and do a find for them, given the fixed
> size and the exact structure of the file, but I'm guessing it may help
> somebody else if this extension were included in exfat-fuse. For every file
> that has the exact size of 1067, check for the structure and then spit out
> the symlink instead of the text file. My guess is that since Microsoft
> states that exFAT doesn't have softlink capabilities, this is a proprietary
> OSX extension.
> (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ee681827%28v=vs.85%29.aspx)
>
> This could even be an optional switch on mount.

Cool. I didn't know about this extension. The only thing that can
complicate implementation of this feature is the need of a library for
MD5 calculation.

Could you attach several examples of such Minshall+French symlink files?

--
Andrew Nayenko <res...@gmail.com>

[Randall Mason]

Calibre Library.new is an absolute link to a directory.  The md5sum is just the md5 of the path to assure no corruption I'm guessing:
echo -n "/Volumes/timeru/rmason/CalibreLibrary" | md5sum
1ec1da6e7b9176ec05d6d2a6e095d9ac  -

cpp is a relative link to a directory.

gundo.vim is a relative link to a file.

Hope that helps!

Randall Mason
clasht...@gmail.com