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How to get 8.3 filename inside DOSBox (under OS X)?

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First post, by emendelson

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For an OS X application that I'm working on, I want to be able to send the 8.3 filename of a file to DOSBox via the command line so that an application running under DOSBox can open the file. The original file may have a long name like this - "My Long FileName.doc" - but applications running under DOSBox can only see the short filename (MYLON~1.DOC). I am trying to figure out what the short filename would be BEFORE I run DOSBox so that I can feed that name through the command line.

Under Windows, it's easy to get the 8.3 filename from a long filename, but I don't know of any way to do this under OS X (or Linux). If anyone knows such a way, I would be very grateful to learn about it.

Reply 1 of 4, by tikbalang

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i think the LFN data is stored within the FAT filesystem, and this differs greatly from *nix fs. unless dosbox provides some form of translation, any dos lfn drivers will fail as it will rely on the FAT info.

you can still try out the drivers:
http://sta.c64.org/lfnemu.html

please post back as i'm interested in the result.

ESS PCI DOS Drivers
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Reply 2 of 4, by emendelson

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tikbalang wrote:

you can still try out the drivers:
http://sta.c64.org/lfnemu.html

Thank you. Both DOSLFN and DOSLFNMS load correctly, but they seem to have no effect at all.

I may try to write an Applescript routine that will generate the expected 8.3 name, and will report here if I succeed.

Reply 3 of 4, by tikbalang

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emendelson wrote:

Thank you. Both DOSLFN and DOSLFNMS load correctly, but they seem to have no effect at all.

I may try to write an Applescript routine that will generate the expected 8.3 name, and will report here if I succeed.

thanks for the confirmation. i was going to suggest DESCRIPT.ION files but you wanted the reverse of what it does.

ESS PCI DOS Drivers
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Reply 4 of 4, by emendelson

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Under Windows, there seems to be a cygpath utility that converts Unix paths to shortnames (among other functions) but it doesn't seem to exist OS X. I've asked in the MacScripter.net forum and will report back if I find anything. This sounds like something that could be useful in some situations, even though it probably has no value at all in running games.

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