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Re: Too long file paths. Should I really care?


On 13 Sep 2005, at 18:31, Laurence Harris wrote:

- I think this is a miserable step backwards from what we had before Mac OS
X. In these days of multi-GHz processors, multi-Gigabytes of RAM, and hard
disks with hundreds of Gigabytes of space, I think it's absurd to be tied to
a 35 year old limitation like this. We should see fewer limitations in this
arena than we did in Mac OS 9 (or 1970s Unix), not more.

Brief historical note: 35 years ago the limit for filenames in Unix was 14 characters (not sure about the path limit). I remember the mixed feelings of  excitement and horror when I heard about the new 255 character limit introduced in BSD in about 1982 - What would we do with all those extra characters? Would people start storing their documents in the filenames instead of the files?

Nostalgia aside, the path limit is way too small seeing as you can hit it with a very shallow folder depth if you use long names with lots of decompositions. I suspect it wouldn't be easy to change though without breaking lots of nasty software which has fixed-size buffers for holding paths. What we need is some sort of opaque object which is small and holds a reference to a file without....oh....

Jerry

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 >Re: Too long file paths. Should I really care? (From: Laurence Harris <email@hidden>)



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