Good afternoon,
I am running a DOS BBS system under DOSBOX-X. When the DOS tosser (squish) creates the *.flo files, it is writing the filename out to the flo in lowercase. However, DOSBOX-X is saving the mail archives to the host OS system (linux) in UPPERCASE.

When binkd (on linux) tries an action on the flo file, it does not find the matching dataset name and deletes the flo file without sending the mail.

I have done some research and it sounds like the DOSBOX dev team believes that writing in UPPERCASE is not a bug because DOS w/o LFN support only supports UPPERCASE.

I have tried turning on LFN support and changing a couple of other settings but none of them cause DOSBOX-X to write the dataset names to the host OS system in lowercase.

Does anyone know if there is a trick to get DOSBOX-X to write files to linux with lowercase names?

Is there a way to use the "ftrans" in the binkd.cfg file to cause it to ignore the filename case that it finds in the flo files?

Couple of quick notes... I am using DOSBOX-X over dosemu because the BBS software developer does not support dosemu because he doesn't use linux, and I am using squish because the BBS software FTN "shim" program doesn't work with crashmail.

Thanks!

$$
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On Sat, 22 Mar 2025 14:05:56 -0500
"Mike Powell" (1:2320/105) <Mike.Powell@f105.n2320.z1.fidonet> wrote:

Good afternoon,
I am running a DOS BBS system under DOSBOX-X. When the DOS tosser
(squish) creates the *.flo files, it is writing the filename out to
the flo in lowercase. However, DOSBOX-X is saving the mail archives
to the host OS system (linux) in UPPERCASE.

When binkd (on linux) tries an action on the flo file, it does not
find the matching dataset name and deletes the flo file without
sending the mail.

I have done some research and it sounds like the DOSBOX dev team
believes that writing in UPPERCASE is not a bug because DOS w/o LFN
support only supports UPPERCASE.

I have tried turning on LFN support and changing a couple of other
settings but none of them cause DOSBOX-X to write the dataset names
to the host OS system in lowercase.

Does anyone know if there is a trick to get DOSBOX-X to write files
to linux with lowercase names?

Is there a way to use the "ftrans" in the binkd.cfg file to cause it
to ignore the filename case that it finds in the flo files?

Couple of quick notes... I am using DOSBOX-X over dosemu because the
BBS software developer does not support dosemu because he doesn't use
linux, and I am using squish because the BBS software FTN "shim"
program doesn't work with crashmail.

Thanks!

$$
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Have you tried

[dosbox]
lower_case_filesystem = true

in your dosbox-x.conf file?
--
End Of The Line BBS - Plano, TX
telnet endofthelinebbs.com 23
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On 22.03.2025 19:05, Mike Powell wrote:

Does anyone know if there is a trick to get DOSBOX-X to write files to
linux with lowercase names?

You could use fileboxes to store outbound mail. Binkd can send aLL fILeS from the fileboxes.

I don't know if your tosser supports fileboxes.

'Tommi

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* Origin: smapinntpd/lnx (2:221/1.0)

Tommi wrote (2025-03-23):

You could use fileboxes to store outbound mail. Binkd can send aLL fILeS from the fileboxes.

I don't know if your tosser supports fileboxes.

Squish does not support fileboxes.

---
* Origin: No REPLY kludge - no reply (2:280/464.47)

Does anyone know if there is a trick to get DOSBOX-X to write files to linux with lowercase names?

You could use fileboxes to store outbound mail. Binkd can send aLL fILeS from the fileboxes.

I don't know if your tosser supports fileboxes.

I don't know that DOS SQUISH does, but I think I might have another utility that would. That is not a bad idea, I will look into that.

I am also considering adding node that runs under dosemu as, IIRC, the
problem wasn't a problem when I used it.

Mike


* SLMR 2.1a * Spelling is a sober man's game
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I am running a DOS BBS system under DOSBOX-X. When the DOS tosser
(squish) creates the *.flo files, it is writing the filename out to
the flo in lowercase. However, DOSBOX-X is saving the mail archives
to the host OS system (linux) in UPPERCASE.

Have you tried

[dosbox]
lower_case_filesystem = true

in your dosbox-x.conf file?

I checked the "universal" conf file and didn't see that setting. I have now tried it. Files written are still all in UPPERCASE on the host os.

Mike

* SLMR 2.1a * 2 + 2 = 5 for extremely small values of 5.
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Re: Re: DOSBOX-X and lowercas
By: Mike Powell to NIGEL REED on Sun Mar 23 2025 10:27:00

I checked the "universal" conf file and didn't see that setting. I have now tried it. Files written are still all in UPPERCASE on the host os.

I think I did have that problem once and the way I got around it was to create a vfat filesystem for that directory.

You can use dd to create a small file and then format it as vfat, mount it to /mnt and copy your files over, and unmount and remount to the new location and add it to fstab. This is one way I found around the issue, but I'm sure sure it's going to help in your case.

You could create a symlink from the lower to upper case name if you know what it's going to be in advance or after the dos program has run? I'd need to know more about how it's used I guess.
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I checked the "universal" conf file and didn't see that setting. I have now
tried it. Files written are still all in UPPERCASE on the host os.

I think I did have that problem once and the way I got around it was to create
a vfat filesystem for that directory.

You can use dd to create a small file and then format it as vfat, mount it to /mnt and copy your files over, and unmount and remount to the new location and
add it to fstab. This is one way I found around the issue, but I'm sure sure it's going to help in your case.

That is another idea worth trying.

You could create a symlink from the lower to upper case name if you know what it's going to be in advance or after the dos program has run? I'd need to know
more about how it's used I guess.

In my case, the datasets in question are being created by an FTN tosser, squish. Squish, for some reason, writes the pathnames in the flo files in UPPERCASE, but is writing out the actual dataset names in the flo files in lowercase.

When linux binkd reads the flo file, it cannot find the dataset because the case in the flo file (lower) doesn't match the case that DOSBOX-X has
written out (UPPER).

I am not sure if I would know for sure the names each time. I would also suspect that, after sending the dataset, binkd might delete the symlink it found that matched the proper case.


* SLMR 2.1a * Arnold Layne, don't do it again!
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Mike wrote (2025-03-24):

I think I did have that problem once and the way I got around it was to
create a vfat filesystem for that directory.

That is another idea worth trying.

There are other filesystems that are or can be mounted case-insensitive too: exFAT, NTFS, JFS, XFS, ext4, f2fs, zfs.

ext4 and f2fs is a bit complicated. NTFS can be mounted with mount.lowntfs-3g. I think the easiest ones are vfat, exfat, jfs and zfs. I just tried jfs and zfs and it seems to work fine. Just in case you want to use a more sophisticated (journaled) filesystem than vfat/exfat.

truncate -s 256M /tmp/jfs.img
mkfs.jfs -O /tmp/jfs.img
mount /tmp/jfs.img /mnt

truncate -s 256M /tmp/zfs.img
zpool create testpool /tmp/zfs.img
zfs create -o casesensitivity=insensitive testpool/outbound

You could also use Squish on Linux.

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* Origin: No REPLY kludge - no reply (2:280/464.47)

Mounting a volume that should support lfn, turning on lfn, setting DOS version to 7.10, etc., didn't help. DOSBOX-X seems pretty determined to write out UPPERCASE 8.3 filenames to the host OS even when I use greater-than 8 characters.

I decided to switch one node back to dosemu and let it handle all the ftn tossing events. That, in the long run, is probably a lot less headache. ;)

Thanks!
Mike

$$
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