Final Year Project:
Using Linux Filesystems Under Windows
Chris Bryden
BEng. Electronics and Software Engineering
School of Computer Science
University of Birmingham
2
The ext2lib library provides a virtual command line to the calling
application. This is to say that it exports functions for displaying partition
information, mounting a partition, ls, cd and cp. The ls function writes the
directory listing that would normally be expected at a command line into memory,
where it can be used by the calling application. The cd and cp commands
perform their respective operations, changing the current directory and coping a
file in the way that would be expected at a real command line, also writing any
output into memory for the use of the calling application.
The next two sections of this dissertation give additional background
material on hard disk structure and the Second Extended filesystem. The
information contained in these sections is vital to understanding how ext2lib was
implemented.
A high level account of how the ext2lib library was designed and a
detailed guide to how this design was implemented with a brief look at the cmdlin
user interface follow.
The final two sections give an analysis of the success of the project and
the conclusions.
The appendices give the original project proposal and specification, a user
manual for the cmdlin interface and a programmers implementation manual for
the ext2lib library.