1. Introducing EFS

EFS is a system for transparent file-transfer between remote VMS, CMS, MTS, MVS, Twenex, Explorer (the last two are Lisp machines), TOPS-20, DOS (running the Distinct, Novell, FTP software, NCSA, Microsoft in both unix and DOS mode, Super TCP, and Hellsoft FTP servers), Windows NT (running the Microsoft or Hummingbird ftp servers), Unix descriptive listings (dl), KA9Q, OS/2 hosts using FTP. This means that you can edit, copy and otherwise manipulate files on any machine you have access to from within Emacs as if it were a local file. EFS works by introducing an extended filename syntax, and overloading functions such as insert-file-contents so that accessing a remote file causes appropriate commands to be sent to an FTP process. EFS includes and enhanced version of Dired to facilitate directory browsing and multiple file transfer from remote hosts.

The authors of EFS are Sandy Rutherford (sandy@math.ubc.ca), Andy (Ange) Norman (ange@hplb.hpl.hp.com), and Mike Sperber (sperber@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de). EFS is partly based on an earlier package called ange-ftp.

Many people have sent in enhancements for ange-ftp and EFS. Members of the ange-ftp and EFS Hall of Fame include:

• Many thanks to Roland McGrath for improving the filename syntax handling, for suggesting many enhancements and for numerous cleanups to the code.

• Thanks to Jamie Zawinski for bugfixes and for ideas such as gateways.

• Thanks to Ken Laprade for improved `.netrc' parsing and password reading, and Dired/shell autoloading.

• Thanks to Sebastian Kremer for tree dired support and for many ideas and bugfixes.

• Thanks to Joe Wells for bugfixes, non-UNIX system support, VOS support, and hostname completion.

• Thanks to Nakagawa Takayuki for many good ideas, filename-completion, help with file-name expansion, efficiency worries, stylistic concerns and many bugfixes.

• Also, thanks to Rob Austein, Doug Bagley, Andy Caiger, Jim Franklin, Noah Friedman, Aksnes Knut-Havard, Elmar Heeb, John Interrante, Roland McGrath, Jeff Morgenthaler, Mike Northam, Jens Petersen, Jack Repenning, Joerg-Martin Schwarz, Michael Sperber, Svein Tjemsland, Andy Whitcroft, Raymond A. Wiker and many others whose names have been forgotten who have helped to debug and fix problems.

Finally, this info file was put together by Mike Sperber (sperber@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de) from an ange-ftp info file written by Dave Smith (dsmith@stats.adelaide.edu.au) and the EFS source code.

This document was generated by XEmacs shared group account on December, 19 2009 using texi2html 1.65.