An software

Welcome to The Star LFN homepage maintained by the author, Joe Forster/STA last updated on 2004-04-25

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IMPORTANT! The development of Star LFN has been suspended. According to my own experiences and user feedback, file access mode (see below) is working fine. If you need a good LFN driver, use DOSLFN (local copy) instead: it has much more features than Star LFN and its disk access (VFAT support, the way that Windows stores long file names) is stable and well implemented. Please, report bugs and wishes, if any, though!

Introduction

Star LFN is a driver that allows software, running under DOS 4.0 or later, to use the long file name functions present in the DOS shells of Windows. It has two operational modes:

• File access. Read and write long file names from and into a system+hidden file. This is more or less complete and stable but it's not how Windows stores long file names. This is the default.

• Disk access. Read and write long file names right into the directory area, just like Windows does. Currently, this is experimental and read-only.

For other similar software, see the LFN drivers page.

Downloads

• Star LFN 0.32 beta (2004-01-31) [starlfn.zip, 50.922 bytes]

• Samples, some archives with long file names to try the software with [lfnsampl.zip, 5.128 bytes]

Useful information

• Online documentation

Compatibility

Software that works fine with Star LFN are the following:

• 4DOS 6.01 (must be fooled to be running under DOS 7.0 + Windows 4.0)

• ARJ 2.60 (must be fooled to be running under DOS 7.0 + Windows 4.0) and 2.71 (no hacks needed)

• Info-ZIP 2.2 and 2.3, 32-bit DOS version

• OpenDOS 7.01 COMMAND.COM, modified to use LFN functions

• PKUNZIP 2.04g

• The Star Commander 0.82

• The Volkov Commander 4.99 alphas

Software that has problems with Star LFN are the following:

• High Voltage SID Collection 1.6 to 2.0 update (bug in DJGPP)

Copyright and license

This software is © by Joe Forster/STA, 2001-2004.

The source of this software is public domain and provided here "as is" – I don't feel like commenting it more but if you have problems then feel free to ask me. If you derive your own software from the source or put a part of the source into your own software, please, give me a credit and send a copy to me.

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