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Re: Any advantages of Unix formatting
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Re: Any advantages of Unix formatting


  • Subject: Re: Any advantages of Unix formatting
  • From: Fritz Anderson <email@hidden>
  • Date: Tue, 4 Sep 2001 14:05:45 -0500

The canonical identifier of a file or folder under HFS is an abstract of the volume location, unique directory within the volume, and the object's name. There is no path-name restriction, as such, in HFS, because in the actual working model of the file system, there are no paths. Paths are an external representation of the canonical form for the aid of users whose needs are limited to Hypercard, BASIC, and the POSIX library.

Pre-HFS+, the API permitted translation between paths and FSSpecs, but the path had to pass through the 8-bit-counted Str255, and that's where the limitation comes in. Longer paths, however, could validly represent file locations; you just had to parse your way through the string (or climb up the directory tree) yourself. The MoreFiles library, provided as example source by Apple, has routines for this.

-- F

On Tuesday, September 4, 2001, at 01:03 PM, Finlay Dobbie wrote:

On Tuesday, September 4, 2001, at 06:31 pm, Rosyna wrote:

I think HFS has a 255 char limit on paths.

I was under the impression that it was more than that, something in the order of 1024 (which most people shouldn't encounter under normal usage). I thought that winblows limited it to 255 and that was another limitation of it compared to the mac?


References: 
 >Re: Any advantages of Unix formatting (From: Finlay Dobbie <email@hidden>)

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