Why are CDROM filenames all UPPERCASE with ;1 attached?
Updated: 11/20/02 CD-ROMs are generally formatted using a filesystem called ISO-9660 (aka ECMA-119), which is an update of an earlier specification called High Sierra. There are very minor differences between the two, and HP-UX supports them both. The user doesn’t have to know which is which, although nobody’s actually produced a High Sierra CD-ROM in many years. ISO-9660 “file identifiers” consist of a filename, a dot, an extension, a semicolon, and a version number from 1 to 32767. The standard specifies three levels of “interchange”, the strictest of which limits filenames to 8 characters, extensions to 3 characters, and the characters can be only upper-case letters, digits and underscores. The reason why the letters are all uppercase is because most CD-ROMs are encoded to the strictest interchange level. To get rid of the semicolon and version number, and to force the filenames to lower case, mount the file system with the “cdcase” option (see mount_cdfs(1M)). There is a widely use
The filenames appear as UPPERCASE filenames with ;1 versions numbers in HP-UX. That’s because HP-UX only supports ISO 9660 and does not translate the all UPPERCASE 8.3 character filenames to lowercase nor does it remove the ;version-numbers as they are stored in exactly this manner on the CDROM. These names, while perfectly acceptable to HP-UX as filenames (albeit a bit inconvenient since most shells see the ; as a command separator), can be a problematic for software not written to handle the CDROM native filename format. Many other vendor offer switches to perform the lowercase and version number removal but HP-UX does not.
