Administering filesystems

About mounting DOS filesystems

You can mount a DOS filesystem and access its files freely while still operating from your UNIX system.

NOTE: The ability to mount DOS filesystems is available, regardless of whether you have a DOS emulator program installed.

When you mount a DOS filesystem, you can edit, examine, or copy DOS data and text files, without first copying them into the UNIX filesystem. However, you cannot execute DOS files and applications from a mounted DOS filesystem. To do this, you must run a DOS emulator such as SCO^® Merge (TM) , or boot DOS from a DOS partition. The DOS mounting feature is intended for existing DOS filesystems (on a floppy disk or on an existing DOS partition).

The UNIX operating system handles mounted DOS filesystems, without actually changing the files, by superimposing certain qualities of UNIX system filesystems on the DOS filesystem. UNIX filesystems are highly structured and operate in a multiuser environment. Thus, many UNIX filesystem concepts do not apply to DOS, including:

file ownership
access permissions
special files (pipes, device files, and so forth)
links

To make DOS files readily accessible, the UNIX system superimposes access permissions and file ownership on the DOS filesystem when you mount it. See ``DOS filesystems and access permissions''.

Because no changes are made to the DOS files, the carriage return character (^M) is visible when you edit a DOS file on a UNIX system. (UNIX systems use only a newline character; DOS uses both a carriage return and a newline.) DOS systems also append an end-of-file character (^Z) to the end of text files.