Organising files on a HDD

[cluttered]

Years ago I was a fairly heavy user of CP/M, but I only had a floppy-based system as I couldn't afford a hard disk back then. Nowadays I'm using a HDD-based CP/M system (both 2.2 and 3.0), and I'm just wondering what is the best way to organise files on a CP/M HDD system.

Given that there is no subdirectory concept, the closest thing is the "user" concept. Is this the best way to organise things so that mutliple applications that have some files with the same names don't cause hassles? Or is there some better way that I'm missing? (For what it's worth I'm using 4 partitions, but I'm not sure how well this will scale if I start adding lots of tools/applications/games.)

 

[Chuck(G)]

No, you've got the right idea. That was one of the weaknesses of CP/M (and MS-DOS 1.x)--a "flat" directory structure with only part of a byte to qualify user numbers. Of course, this comes from a time when few people had hard disks. ZCPR3 can make the job of working with multiple user numbers a bit easier; CP/M and MP/M are a bit clumsy in that respect.

 

[cluttered]

No, you've got the right idea. That was one of the weaknesses of CP/M (and MS-DOS 1.x)--a "flat" directory structure with only part of a byte to qualify user numbers. Of course, this comes from a time when few people had hard disks. ZCPR3 can make the job of working with multiple user numbers a bit easier; CP/M and MP/M are a bit clumsy in that respect.

Thanks for the confirmation, at least I can now stop looking for a better solution that just isn't there (at least in "standard" CP/M)

 

[Chuck(G)]

As you've discovered, there's the option of multiple partitions--but that gets clumsy pretty quickly.