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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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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