• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1136 0

you are sure the partition contains only text files. Stick with binary (the default) and convert your files manually on an as-needed basis. See "File Translation Utilities," later in this chapter, for directions on how to do this.

As with other filesystem types, you can mount MS-DOS and NTFS filesystems automatically at system bootup by placing an entry in your /etc/fstab file. For example, the following line in /etc/fstab mounts a Windows 98 partition onto /win:

/dev/hda1 /win vfat defaults,umask=002,uid=500,gid=500 0 0

When accessing any of the msdos, vfat, or ntfs filesystems from Linux, the system must somehow assign Unix permissions and ownerships to the files. By default, ownerships and permissions are determined using the user ID and group ID, and umasking of the calling process. This works acceptably well when using the mount command from the shell, but when run from the boot scripts, it will assign file ownerships to root, which may not be desired. In the previous example, we use the umask option to specify the file and directory creation mask the system will use when creating files and directories in the filesystem. The uid option specifies the owner (as a numeric user ID, rather than a text name), and the gid option specifies the group (as a numeric group ID). All files in the filesystem will appear on the Linux system as having this owner and group. Since dual-boot systems are generally used as workstations by a single user, you will probably want to set the uid and gid options to the user ID and group ID of that user's account.

File Translation Utilities

One of the most prominent problems when it comes to sharing files between Linux and Windows is that the two systems have different conventions for the line endings in text files. Luckily, there are a few ways to solve this problem:

If you access files on a mounted partition on the same machine, let the kernel convert the files automatically, as described in "Filesystems and Mounting" earlier in this chapter. Use this with care!

When creating or modifying files on Linux, common editors such as Emacs and vi can handle the conversion automatically for you.

There are a number of tools that convert files from one line-ending convention to the other. Some of these tools can also handle other conversion tasks as well.

Use your favorite programming language to write your own conversion utility.

If all you are interested in is converting newline characters, writing programs to perform the conversions is surprisingly simple. To convert from DOS format to Unix format, replace every occurrence of (\r\f or \r\n) in the file to a newline (\n). To go the other way, convert every newline to a . For example, we show you two Perl programs that do the job. The first, which we call d2u, converts from DOS format to Unix format:

#!/usr/bin/perl

while () { s/\r$//; print }

And the following program (which we call u2d) converts from Unix format to DOS format:

#!/usr/bin/perl

while () { s/$/\r/; print }

Both commands read the input file from the standard input, and write the output file to standard output. You can easily modify our examples to accept the input and output filenames on the command line. If you are too lazy to write the utilities yourself, you can see if your Linux installation contains the programs dos2unix and unix2dos, which work similarly to our simple d2u and u2d utilities, and also accept filenames on the command line. Another similar pair of utilities is fromdos and todos. If you cannot find any of these, then try the flip command, which is able to translate in both directions.

If you find these simple utilities underpowered, you may want to try recode, a program that can convert just about any text-file standard to any other.

The most simple way to use recode is to specify both the old and the new character sets (encodings of text-file conventions) and the file to convert. recode will overwrite the old file with the converted one; it will have the same filename. For example, to convert a text file