Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!ncar!boulder!sunybcs!rutgers!iuvax!bsu-cs!dhesi
From: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Nulling out the filename in Turbo C 1.5
Message-ID: <2711@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Date: 23 Apr 88 17:34:25 GMT
References: <554@picuxa.UUCP>
Reply-To: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Organization: CS Dept, Ball St U, Muncie, Indiana
Lines: 25
Summary: be portable and well-behaved

In article <554@picuxa.UUCP> rcr@picuxa.UUCP (Richard Court ) writes:
>I would like to null out the entire filename from the FAT instead of just the
>first character.

I suspect you will get lots of replies telling you how to access the
file allocation table directly.

Don't.  Too many programmers hastily do low-level nonportable stuff,
and aren't around a year or two later when the software breaks and the
frustrated user has to switch to a new product.

I suggest the following portable approach.

Reserve a funny single-character filename for your own use.  Suppose it
is "@".  To remove the filename of your target file from the file
allocation table, you:

(a) delete any file called "@" if it exists
(b) rename the file you are zapping to "@"
(c) delete the new file "@"

MS-DOS system calls exist to delete and rename files.  Please
double-check to make sure that the above does completely eradicate the
filename from disk.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi         UUCP:  <backbones>!{iuvax,pur-ee,uunet}!bsu-cs!dhesi