ISO8601 desideratum

[Steve Fabian]

Charles:
I appreciate your many plug-ins, and thank you for the effort you put into building and maintaining them.

I have one problem with the @FILESTAMP function - unlike the TCC internal features, it does not work for files accessed via FTP. This means that I need a different command to list FTP-accessed files than local files. I wonder how difficult would be for @FILESTAMP to use the TCC internal functions @filedate and @filetime to obtain the data for FTP files? This would allow the same commands / aliases to be used everywhere. I realize the limitation that UTC to true local time conversion implies; my personal choice is to gather all raw data as UTC and convert to local time uniformly (as specified in the @FILESTAMP output format parameter). I am also aware that some Posix file systems report TOD as 00:00 when a file is older than some particular time. On your own FTP site it seems to be six months, as files dated 2012-08-28 show midnight, files dated exactly six months ago today (2012-09-04) show an actual TOD. IIRC on Unix System V it was exactl a year, because the reporting format included either year or TOD in the same position due to the limitations of the hardware of 4 decades ago. Strange that some are willing to live with such limitations...

 

[Charles Dye]

I have one problem with the @FILESTAMP function - unlike the TCC internal features, it does not work for files accessed via FTP. This means that I need a different command to list FTP-accessed files than local files. I wonder how difficult would be for @FILESTAMP to use the TCC internal functions @filedate and @filetime to obtain the data for FTP files?

I actually had something like that in early versions of the function. But it was ugly, ugly, ugly, and never was very reliable. I wound up removing all of that code; the results never justified the Rube Goldberg horror of the hack.

 

[Steve Fabian]

Alas, without such a hack one cannot get compatible localized timestamps from both local and internet files by a single invocation of PDIR. UTC offers compatiblity, but is inconvenient, and fails with most USB devices of the thumb drive type, which use FAT/VFAT file systems.

 

[rconn]

USB drives only use VFAT because the manufacturers format them for the lowest common denominator. The first thing I do with a new thumb drive is reformat it for NTFS.

 

[Steve Fabian]

Good advice for devices which are only used through USB ports of Windows platforms. However, I am also talking about SD cards shared with other devices, e.g., cameras. I never attempted to insert one which is NTFS formatted in my camera, because I worry the camera software could not handle it. And old CD/DVD disks.

 

[fpefpe]

Good advice for devices which are only used through USB ports of Windows platforms. However, I am also talking about SD cards shared with other devices, e.g., cameras. I never attempted to insert one which is NTFS formatted in my camera, because I worry the camera software could not handle it. And old CD/DVD disks.

I am not sure if its the standard, but SANDISK is using exFAT for SDXC (64g and greater) There is a MS download to support this
on XP (just to read and write, no format) -- its on Vista and later ... It seems to be fast (no CACLS) and can be formatted with
various cluster size and it can support files > 4g

The down size is that software like diskeeper does not know how to compress this format -