Msdos hidden files viewable from linux?

[albert at ccs.neu.edu (Albert Cahalan)]

>    WRT: DOS bits.
> 
>    Albert, how do you plan to preserve the hidden and system bits in
>    the case where files are backed up and them restored. Maybe,
>    instead of (or in addition to) using the leading '.', maybe you
>    could set the setuid, and setgid bits which otherwise have no
>    meaning for a umsdos partition.
> 
> Perhaps the names of files that have special bits should get prefixed
> by '.'  followed by a character that encodes the special bits.

Files with the hidden bit become dotfiles - easy.

For the archive and system bits, I plan to use the ext2fs
attributes d (not dumpable) and i (immutable).  See the
chattr man page for an explanation.  Any better ideas?

Note that it is _impossible_ to correctly backup and restore DOS system
files without low-level disk access (read: dangerous).  The system bit
means that the file is sensitive to it's physical position on disk.
As far as I know, you can't back up and restore /boot or the kernel
either, because lilo gets confused.  The same goes for msdos.sys and
io.sys.  Maybe someone could write a program to fix the boot sector to
point to these files.