From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!floyd!cmcl2!philabs!sdcsvax!sdccsu3!sdcattb!sdcarl!randvax!ucsfcgl!ucbvax!ARPAVAX:mo Newsgroups: net.eunice,net.unix-wizards Title: Re: Unity and related topics Article-I.D.: ucbarpa.2013 Posted: Thu Sep 9 11:30:32 1982 Received: Sat Sep 11 01:42:26 1982 References: duke.2501 Unity maps filenames in a way which uses the VMS names, but allows full Unix transparency. When a filename is allowable as a VMS filename, it is used as-is. When it contains non-RAD50 characters, it is mapped into a unique name of a very specific form. There is a table of these translations kept in a file in the directory. This sounds somewhat hokey, but turns out to win quite often. The number of times it gets invoked isn't that bad, and "ls" is modified to know about these peculiar names and not display them (sort of like "." files). A VMS DIR command will show them, but the normal "ls" doesn't. The only thing I can't figure out how to do is real links. Since VMS doesn't have them, I can't see an easy way to do them (doesn't mean the haven't found a way!), but you can do symbolic links (but I don't know if they did that). Anyway, real Unix filename transparency is a big win, and the mechanism Unity uses works out pretty well, or seems to. -Mike