SPUG: getting filesystem info? (a la File::Spec)

[dancerboy]

So, I'm trying to create a module that will, in effect, tell you 
everything you could possibly want to know about how to construct 
legal file- and path-names on the current filesystem.  Specifically:

1) the directory-separator
2) maximum filename length
3) whether filenames are case-sensitive
4) if not, whether filenames are case-preserving (e.g. MacOS)
5) what characters are or are not legal in filenames
6) other restrictions on filenames (e.g. DOS filenames can have only a single
    period, and the file extension after the period is limited to 3 characters)

Maybe some other things that I'm not thinking of at the moment.

File::Spec does some of this, but not all.  I'd also like to do this 
in a more platform-independent way than File::Spec (i.e., as much as 
possible, I'd like the module to figure these things by directly 
querying the OS/filesystem, rather than relying on a database of how 
different OS's "should" behave.  For one thing, remote volumes may 
not behave as expected based on the local OS's filesystem 
conventions.)

So, my questions are:

1)  Does a module exist that already does this?  I didn't see 
anything on CPAN, but I confess my CPAN searches are not always 
thorough (mostly because the cpan.org website is SLOW as F***.  I 
just don't have the patience to wait 5-minutes for each search 
result... are there any good mirrors out there?)

2)  Any suggestions for platform-independent ways of doing #1 and #6 
from my list above?

3)  Any suggestions for *better* ways of doing #2-5?  My idea now is 
simply to do a completely empirical test:  attempting to create and 
then stat a series of dummy files, whose names are generated so as to 
discover the filesystem limitations as efficiently as possible.

4)  Any other suggestions about what this module ought to do, or 
issues that I'm not seeing? (I'm considering submitting this to CPAN 
once I'm done...)

Some issues that I *am* aware of:

1)  The main purpose of this module is to assist in the creation of 
files in specific locations, so I'm not all that concerned with 
volumes/directories which the current process cannot write to, for 
whatever reason.

2)  I'm deliberately *not* worrying about finding general info about 
*volume* specification, because, as I said, the file-naming rules can 
change from one volume to another.  The purpose of the module is to 
answer the question: what filenames can I use *here* (in a particular 
volume/directory).

3)  I'm not really sure what the best way of dealing with #6 is.  My 
current plan is simply to check whether there is a limit to how long 
file extensions can be, and whether periods can appear in other parts 
of the filename.  There are probably other things I could/should 
check, but these seem to me to be the most important.

4)  My algorithm is probably going to assume that any pre-existing 
files have completely legal filenames: this could potentially cause 
problems on filesystems in which "special" files can have names that 
aren't legal for normal files. (E.g. I'll obviously have to make a 
special exception for the filenames "." and "..")

So... comments?

-jason

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