[Gllug] OT: Very long pathnames

[Peter Ball]

On 24 May 2005 at 13:06, Christian Smith wrote:

> On Mon, 23 May 2005, Peter Ball wrote:
> 
 >Windows will actually save and use path names which exceed its own
> >specifications (I've got one here where the total path is 264
> >characters - the file name alone is 197 characters).  It works fine
> >until you try to copy the share and god knows what it does when you
> >backup, restore, zip, unzip etc.
> 
> 264 is perfectly valid for a path name in Windows. NTFS supports file
> names up to 255 characters. Not sure whether SMB puts restrictions on
> file name length, but these names are well within NTFS bounds.

Ha, I wish it was that simple.

 For example under Windows the File Save As menu In Mozilla or OE will pick up the <title> 
from the HTML header as the file name (presumably up to 255 characters - don't know what 
happens if its 256 characters).  Usually (but not always) the saved pages can be seen and 
opened via Windows Explorer and other programs - however if you try to remove, rename, 
copy or delete a file/folder with a full path name of more than 255 characters you end up with 
a "File system error 1148".  fwiw It is also seems possible that the same symptoms can 
occur if the HTML <title> includes characters or names which windows considers illegal.

<Rant On>

What fun it is managing a network with 2 flavours of Linux and 4 flavours of Windows.

But why does:

	html <title> allow unrestricted length for something that's just
	supposed to appear in the title bar?

	Mozilla, IEexplorer and probably most other browsers use the
	un-truncated <title> as the file name when they could very reasonably
	truncate it to 50 or at the most 100 characters and 999 times out of
	1000 nobody would ever see the difference.

	What is the point of folder & file names like:

"SLAVERY ABOLITION ACT  1833 - SECT 12 After 1st August, 1834, all slaves in the 
British colonies shall be emancipated, and slavery shall be abolished throughout the British 
possessions abroad_files"

<Rant Off>

Thanks for comments so far :-)


-----------------------------------
Peter Ball
Computers For Linguists
peter.ball at marguet-ball.net
Tel:    +44(0)20 7732 1741
Fax:    +44(0)20 7358 9214
Mobile: +44(0)77 1968 2913
45 Endwell Road, London, SE4 2PQ, United Kingdom

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