#132

Expose Long/HPFS filenames with REXX on OS/2

Notes

NB: this was written (and last tested!) in 1993

System Requirements

ShowLong requires REXX to be properly installed on your system. It also requires RXQUEUE.EXE which should be found in C:\OS2. It has been developed under IBM OS/2 v2.x - I’m not sure how it will go under previous versions.

About ShowLong

ShowLong is used to expose all of the files/directories in a specified direcory tree that have names that don’t conform to the DOS FAT 8.3 standard. It simply lists all offending files with full path info - its up to you to decide what you do with the information!

The utility was initially developed to provide a quick “DOS compatibility” check for files being moved between environments, but has other uses such as when preparing to migrate an HPFS partition to FAT.

Using ShowLong

Getting help:     SHOWLONG /?
Usage:
       SHOWLONG [RootDir]

Output is a list of all files/directories with non-DOS FAT 8.3 names.

Where RootDir is the “root” directory from where to start the scan of files. The default is the current directory. Note that scans will search all sub-directories. Eg: to scan all of D: drive:

  SHOWLONG D:\

NB: It is possible to use file masks if appropriate:

  SHOWLONG D:\*.doc

Credits and References