I'm experimenting with compression utilities that run under pure DOS as a backup utility. The minimum criteria is: the ability to preserve long file names, directory recursion, support for hidden and system files, preserve file attributes as-is without change.

I knew that RAR had a DOS utility and I thought that this would be perfect for the job. However, it seems to have a very strange problem where it converts all filenames to lowercase. This is absolutely terrible and bizarre. There is already a command line switch -cl to do this, so I don't know why this would be the default behavior. There is also a -cu switch to change filenames to all uppercase, which works fine. But I can't find any option to explicitly preserve the existing case or to somehow negate the lowercase behavior.

The tool is also odd in that it inherits the case of the file as typed. For example, a file "test", if targeted as "tEsT" will archive the file with that particular case. The issue with files inheriting all lowercase is a result of archiving a directory recursively; this is the default behavior.

The latest version I could find is 3.93 from 2010. Unfortunately, this tool is useless if you want to preserve a target as-is without modification.

Does anyone know if I'm somehow missing a switch for the desired behavior? It seems really odd for it to be implemented this way.

I've attached a test for demonstration. If you run it in Windows 9x or NT, you simply run "RAR-TEST.BAT". If you are in DOS and do not have DOSLFN or DPMI services running, then you will need to run "LFN.BAT" first.

I have been testing various utilities so far for archiving purposes including those shipped with FreeDOS, but the only one I've found that is able to handle all of my requirements so far has been, ironically, PKZIP. The most common issue a lack of support for long filenames.