Re: What's the weirdest filesystem out there?

"Antoon Pardon" <apardon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:slrndtu64v.qei.apardon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Op 2006-01-30, David Buck schreef <david.buck@xxxxxxxxxx>:
> > Antoon Pardon wrote:
> >> Op 2006-01-30, Ian Pilcher schreef <i.pilcher@xxxxxxxxxxx>:
[snip]
> >>> Is there any platform out there that uses something than its
> >>> directory separator to signify a root directory? (To put it another
> >>> way, what's the weirdest hierarchical filesystem out there?)
> >>
> >> ADFS? It was used on the Archimes machines from acorn.
> >
> > That's Archimedes

In fact, the filesystem originated on the BBC Master computers. (There were
some modifications along the way: on the BBC, it was limited to 47 entries
per directory.)

> >> '$' was used for the root directory and '.' was the directory
> >> separator. So a full name was something like:
> >>
> >> :MediaName.$.sub1.sub2.file
> >
> > No worse than DOS, just different identifiers.
>
> I would say in some sense better than DOS. Because the :MediaName
> could refer to the specific carier instead of the drive the carrier
> was inserted in.

I never understood why DOS was not extended similarly, so you could write eg
"volume_label:\path\to\file".

The alternative disc filesystem for the BBC was called simply DFS (the A in
ADFS is "Advanced"), and was available on the earlier BBC Model B. IIRC, it
had a two-level hierarchy with single-character directory names, and the
default directory was "$". I guess this is where the "$" as the root
directory in ADFS came from.

Alex


.

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