Leonard Erickson wrote in a message to Peter Knapper:

 LE> At least until and unless OS/2 gets support for Win95 style
 LE> long file names. 

 PK> NO!!! We certainly DONT want a kludge like that thank-you!

 LE> Admittedly, it's a kludge. But it's also *common*, which
 LE> means we need to be able to import and export it.

 LE> It'd also be nice if OS/2 could "borrow" a trick from Netware. 
 LE> Netware creates an 8.3 "alias" so that DOS programs *can* 
 LE> access such files. The problem is that the name is neither 
 LE> predictable nor "settable" (at least in my version of Netware). 

 LE> By "settable", I mean that I can't assign a *specific* 8.3 name 
 LE> to a file *and* keep the long name. Something like the Unix 
 LE> trick of pointing multiple directory entries at the same name 
 LE> would be the best answer. I forget what the Unix command is. 

They're called links.  "Hard" links are simply multiple directory entries
pointing at the same file,  and all must reside on the same filesystem. 
"Symbolic" links,  on the other hand,  can go across filesystems.  The "rm"
command simply removes a link,  and does _not_ delete the file unless there
are no other links still in place.

This would require a link count field to be present in the directory info for
the file,  meaning a bit of redesign of the filesystem,  but it can't be
*that* hard to do.

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