You may have noticed that Seamonkey, Firefox or Thunderbird or another application all of a sudden (after a restart) has lost all or many settings/profiles etc.
This is not limited to those applications, but as they're a central part of what one use, more likely that you've also have seen.
Files downloaded from the internet these days usually have these long names and software ported from other systems create files with long file names, both for settings and other output.
The problem is that the file system sometimes loose the info about the long file name and revert to a short form with the length 8.3
To improve the chanse to recover files, one can set the .LONGNAME EA (Extended Attribute).
Ported software are unaware of the concept of EA, even "native" software doesn't write .LONGNAME EA to files, thus it is very strange to think that every application has to write .LONGNAME EA to files. It would be more appropiate if the IFS driver would handle something as that...
but JRescuer contain a litte script (setln.cmd) that set .LONGNAME of each file, so that one can recover and set the proper file name.
setln.cmd contain a function that call itself repeatedly (recursively) to go through files and set the .LONGNAME EA.
What the script lack, is the ability to set the file name nor output information about the process.
A rewrite would be interesting to explore that address the issue, as and update to the file system (JFS) and deeper understanding and acceptance to add the feature to the ifs driver is far away.
1. Change the recursive calls
2. Show output of what the script do
3. Rename files that has lost the name