NewDeal Hot Tip 1507

[Hot Tips for...] General Use

Long Folder Names

NewDeal creates a file called @dirname.000 whenever you name a directory with lower case letters, spaces, punctuation, or with a name longer than 8 letters. The @dirname.000 file contains the long directory name and other information about the directory, including any links within the directory. NewDeal does not display the @dirname.000 file, but you can see it if you issue a DIR command from DOS, or if you examine a directory from another program.

In some cases, if you happen to move or copy the @dirname.000 file from one directory to another, it can be a bit confusing, because NewDeal will display the directory using the long name stored in the @dirname.000 file, instead of the directory's normal DOS name.

Say, for example, you have directory named "my stuff" and a directory named "junk Stuff". Lets also say you copy (from DOS, or using a program like XTree) the contents of the "junk Stuff" directory into "my stuff".

What happens is the @dirname.000 file for "junk Stuff" writes over the @dirname.000 file in "my stuff". Now NewDeal will NOT see the "my stuff" directory any more, because it thinks its name is "junk Stuff".

This also happens when some one uses PKZIP to ZIP up all the files (*.*) in a directory for uploading. If you download and unZIP that file, the directory on your computer will take on the name of the directory that was on the uploader's computer, when viewed from NewDeal. For this reason, we recommend that you check for @dirname.000 files from the DOS prompt or from another file manager outside NewDeal before using PKZIP to archive a directory full of files. If you find that a directory contains an @dirname.000 file, either delete the @dirname.000 file or move the files to be archived into a different directory before running PKZIP.


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Last Modified 2 Mar 1999