Comment 3 for bug 113070

I have firefox configured to download to a directory named /ftp.

$ ls -l /ftp
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 6 Jun 12 23:48 /ftp -> /d/ftp
$ mount
...
/dev/sda5 on /d type vfat (rw,utf8,umask=02,uid=1000,gid=1000,iocharset=utf8,quiet,shortname=winnt)
$ ls -ld /d/ftp
drwxrwxr-x 5 jrw jrw 4096 Jun 12 23:51 /d/ftp
$ uname -a
Linux nalini 2.6.20-16-generic #2 SMP Thu Jun 7 20:19:32 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux

firefox->help->about
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20061201 Firefox/2.0.0.4 (Ubuntu-feisty)

visit http://directory.fsf.org/cpio.html
select link ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/cpio/cpio-2.8.tar.gz

$ ls -l /ftp/cpio*
06/12 23:56:45 $ ls -l cpio*
-rwxrwxr-x 1 jrw jrw 0 Jun 12 23:51 /ftp/cpio-2.8.tar.gz

So, the file is created but never populated and the download manager window doesn't appear, either. However, when I changed /ftp to point to an ext3 filesystem, the tar.gz file downloaded properly. When I created /ftp as a directory (rather than as a symlink), it also downloaded correctly -- obviously in this case /ftp was on an ext3 filesystem rather than on a vfat filesystem. The same thing happened when I set the download directory in Preferences to be on a vfat filesystem (without a symlink).

Also, I noticed when downloading an attachment from my yahoo mail account a strange anomaly when the file was a text file named "hah" (no extension) -- yahoo said it was of type "BIN". The file downloaded correctly but when the file system was vfat, the file was named "hah.bin". When the download directory was on an ext3 filesystem, the file was downloaded properly as "hah". I don't know if it's related (probably not), but it's annoying.

Please let me know how I can help you debug this. Thanks!