Wanting to give some source code back to osdev.net

[nmcgill]

Hi, I've written a little fat32/16/12 disk tool that allows the user to add/remove/etc... files.
Great...

I really wrote this as a learning exercise and it's used in-house in my company now and seems
to be quite useful as an alternative to mounting disks on linux.

As many of the learnings came from osdev, I'd like to give this tool to osdev to help others
learn the obscurities of windows filesystems. It's by no means unique, but is well commented.

Ok, so why am I asking here?

My company wants to know if osdev would be receptive of such a tool (I'll eventually stick it on
github and I guess it can be linked to from one of the osdev pages) - but - I can't open source
until I have a contact in the "community" that is receptive. Chicken and egg.

Anyway, if someone is interested in seeing the source for this, please let me know and if I can use
this as interest in the community.

fyi, a snippet from the tools help page to give more of an idea what I'm talking about

$ fatdisk mybootdisk ls
----daD 0 2013 Jan 02 locale/ LOCALE
-----aD 18573 2013 Jan 02 ast.mo AST.MO
...

$ fatdisk mybootdisk info

$ fatdisk mybootdisk summary

$ fatdisk mybootdisk extract dir
-- dumps dir to the local disk
$ fatdisk mybootdisk rm dir
-- recursively remove dir
$ fatdisk mybootdisk rm dir/*/*.c
-- selectively remove files
$ fatdisk mybootdisk add dir
-- recursively add dir to the disk
$ fatdisk mybootdisk hexdump foo.c
-- dump a file from the disk

$ fatdisk mybootdisk format size 1G name MYDISK part 0 50% \
bootloader grub_disk part 1 50% fat32 bootloader grub_disk

-- create and format a 1G disk
with 2 FAT 32 partitions and grub
installed in sector 0 of part 0



thanks

Neil

[sortie]

I've written a few tools like this for my initrd format and ext2, although they were read only. I don't care much about FAT (because it's fat and ugly), but a similar tool for ext2 and other real filesystems could be useful.

[nmcgill]

FAT is fat and ugly. But sometimes you're stuck with it. Thanks, this helps.

[Brynet-Inc]

There is already mtools, which historically has be used on Unix systems. It's been around since the mid 90's, I still prefer it rather than mounting foreign non-Unix filesystems.

[nmcgill]

FWIW here is the tool - feel free to comment - thanks

https://github.com/goblinhack/fatdisk