Friday, October 14, 2005

OpenAFS vs ntvdm.exe wildcard searches

In the OpenAFS RT there has been a ticket open for over a year because 16-bit applications when executed out of AFS were crashing.  It turns out that ntvdm.exe will perform wildcard searches for files as FOO?????.C?? instead of FOO*.C*.  OpenAFS for Windows was failing to match this pattern to FOO.C as it implemented a semantic of '?' must match a single character other than (dot).  The real rule is that (dot) is the component separator and '?' matches a single character and may match no characters if it is at the end of a component and the input string is empty.
With this fix all of those people who wish to execute the DOS versions of Quatro or Microsoft Word out of AFS (you know who you are) can rejoice.

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