Subject: Re: Creating MS-DOS filesystems
To: Matthias Scheler <tron@lyssa.owl.de>
From: Jason Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov>
List: current-users
Date: 01/20/1997 18:12:02
On 21 Jan 1997 01:21:26 +0100 
 tron@lyssa.owl.de (Matthias Scheler) wrote:

 > now that we finally have a working "fdformat" - good job, who ever did it -
 > I would like to be able to create 3rd party especially MS-DOS filesystems,
 > too. Am I wrong or is there no command for this job yet? I could grab the
 > source of "mformat" from the latest M-Tools and prepare it for integration.
 > But maybe it would be better to write some kind of "alienmkfs" which can
 > create any kind of filesystem (MS-DOS, AmigaOS etc.) based on a configuration
 > file.
 > 
 > Opinions?

Always :-)

In a perfect world, we'd have:

	newfs_ffs
	newfs_lfs
	newfs_msdosfs
	newfs_adosfs

...etc.  There would be a signle "driver" program, called "newfs", which
would be invoked like:

	newfs -t ffs /dev/rsd5f
	newfs -t msdosfs /dev/rfd0a

If no -t argument is given, the system would default to ffs.

This would be in line with how mount and fsck work.

Jason R. Thorpe                                       thorpej@nas.nasa.gov
NASA Ames Research Center                               Home: 408.866.1912
NAS: M/S 258-6                                          Work: 415.604.0935
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