I'm pretty certain that it is impossible to write a device driver in perl. DDs have to operate in a very restricted environment and be fully reentrant. And having written a few, I'll tell that it is a distinctly non-trivial task.

If you simply want a gooey interface to ftp, just spread some jam on your keyboard (Sorry, my mind wandered :), it would be far quicker and easier to grab one of the myriad freeware apps kicking around.

Or even use your browser. Most of them will allow you to type an ftp:// url into the address bar

Net::FTP can speak directly to any FTP-server without you having to register an additional device driver.

CountZero

A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James

not exactly referring to my idea...

Another approach if you've got a Linux box handy might be to re-export a FuSE filesystem (see curlftpfs for example, or roll your own with Fuse) which does the FTP part. Just make that visible as CIFS via samba and you'd be good.

A quick glance at the Dokan library documentation suggests to me that you could access the dokan.dll using Win32::API and thus provide a file system written in Perl. It seems to me that it would be a lot of work! The dokan authors strongly recommend that you use a Virtual Machine when you develop file system applications - that sounds like very sage advice to me!

Thanks for the hint, I will have a look into it! But as you remarked that it would be *a lot* of work, I do not feel so inclined anymore to try it...

I wrote some XS codes to use Dokan.dll from perl. It's a very early early version, not fully tested, but works. (ActivePerl Build 810, and VC++2008)

Source code is available from:
http://svn.sourceforge.jp/view/Win32-Dokan/?root=perl-fuse-fv

(binary release is not available now)

• dokan.h has advanced to revision 26, but the .xs code used by Win32::Dokan does not use the new API introduced a few revisions earlier.
• dokan-0.4.2.1238 x86 2008/12/31 is out (don't know if that was the version I was using earlier) but I still does not "magically solve problems"...
• Win32::Dokan now advanced to a tagged revision _0.03_1, but problems remain, a compile agains dokan.h r7 and r26 failed on strawberry perl

Hi isync, thanks for your report! (I'm tofjw. Sorry I don't have an account on this site.)

1. Many warnings.

Warnings about SyncExec are reported because first argment of SyncExec is decalared as:

   typedef int (Func_t)(SV* self, void* pParam);
[download]

but passed function (ex. DP_WriteFile) is declared like below.

  static int DP_WriteFile(void* self, void* pParam)
[download]

(conflict of SV* and void*)

Yes, it's a bug, but I think it's harmless.

2. Not resolved symbols (_gmtime64_s and _localtime64_s)

They are thread safe 64bit variant of gmtime (and localtime) in MSVC runtime. If they are not in your C runtime, you can re-write using gmtime and localtime. Because in this version of Win32-Dokan, execution of callbacks are serialized using Win32 event object.

First, replace functions in Dokan.xs like following and try build.

  static void set_file_time(LPFILETIME pFileTime, time_t t)
  {
      *pFileTime = 0;
  }

  static time_t get_file_time(const FILETIME* pFileTime)
  {
      return 0;
  }
[download]

Timestamp will be NOT correct, but you can confirm script works or not.

Thank you for getting back! I will try another compile-run as soon as possible.

Update: I actually managed to get a version together that threw only warnings on dmake. A subsequent dmake -i got me to a runnable version of Win32::Dokan.
Anyway, running examples/mirror.pl resulted in an error: "&Win32::Dokan::constant not defined at mirror.pl line 17" with line 17 being

14: my $fs = Mirror->new("D:/");
15: my $mounter = Win32::Dokan::Mounter->new({debug_mode => 1,
16:                      use_std_err => 1});
17: $mounter->mount('W', $fs);
[download]



Testing other combinations: this SVN version lacks a META.yml (the sourceforge version contains it) and using it with the modifications in Dokan.xs gave among warnings an error: "In function `set_file_time': Dokan.xs:296: error: incompatible types in assignment".

I hope this helps and you feel motivated for another release/patch on SVN: trunk that works more seamlessly with newer dokan.h.