Very short explanation for the impatient!!!

Umsdos is a file system driver that run on top the MSDOS fs driver.
It is written by Jacques Gelinas (jacques@solucorp.qc.ca)

Umsdos is not a file system per se, but a twist to make a boring
one into a useful one.

It gives you:

	long file name
	Permissions and owner
	Links
	Special files (devices, pipe...)
	All is need to be a linux root fs.

There is plenty of documentation on it in the source. A formated document
made from those comments is available from
sunsite.unc.edu:/pub/Linux/system/Filesystems/umsdos.

Mostly...

You mount a DOS partition like this

mount -t umsdos /dev/hda3 /mnt
         ^
---------|

All option are passed to the msdos drivers. Option like uid,gid etc are
given to msdos.

The default behavior of Umsdos is to do the same thing as the msdos driver
mostly passing commands to it without much processing. Again, this is
the default. After doing the mount on a DOS partition, nothing special
happen. This is why all mount options are passed to the Msdos fs driver.

Umsdos use a special DOS file --linux-.--- to store the information
which can't be handle by the normal MsDOS file system. This is the trick.

--linux-.--- is optional. There is one per directory.

**** If --linux-.--- is missing, then Umsdos process the directory the
     same way the msdos driver do. Short file name, no goodies, default
     owner and permissions. So each directory may have or not this
     --linux-.---

Now, how to get those --linux-.---.

\begin joke_section

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==========================

Not all varieties of the Amiga filesystems are supported for reading and
writing. The Amiga currently knows 6 different filesystems:

DOS\0		The old or original filesystem, not really suited for
		hard disks and normally not used on them, either.
		Supported read/write.

DOS\1		The original Fast File System. Supported read/write.

DOS\2		The old "international" filesystem. International means that
		a bug has been fixed so that accented ("international") letters
		in file names are case-insensitive, as they ought to be.
		Supported read/write.

DOS\3		The "international" Fast File System.  Supported read/write.

DOS\4		The original filesystem with directory cache. The directory
		cache speeds up directory accesses on floppies considerably,
		but slows down file creation/deletion. Doesn't make much
		sense on hard disks. Supported read only.

DOS\5		The Fast File System with directory cache. Supported read only.

All 