Re: file names.number of characters

[stuckey@mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu (Anthony J. Stuckey)]

nathan@cco.caltech.edu (Nathan Mates) writes:
[fairly long rant about CPM-origins deleted.]
>16 less K than the other. MS-DOS adopted the 3-char extension, but
>went to storing it as bytes, so you can have all sorts of illegal
>chars in filenames.

	I have heard, at various times through the years, that the MSDOS
directory structure has unused bytes (which I find likely) and that these
are placed in such a way that you could use longer filenames under an MS-DOS
FST.  I have no idea how I could verify this.

>   On the Apple II, Dos 3.3 (and its predecessors) had rather nice
>(40-char) names, with no extensions; a separate byte was used to
>identify what type of file it wasm

	I thought that DOS3.3 only allowed 31-character filenames?

>   ProDOS apparently wanted to act a little like MS-DOS or CP/M, so it
>went to much more restrictive filenames, but upped the number of
>filetypes and auxtypes things had. You win some, you lose some.

	15 characters is hardly restrictive.
	Many Unix systems have a 14-character limit, some others have a 255.
I'm not aware of any system which has either literally or effectively
unlimited filename lengths.  VMS is 40 characters in the name and
extension, with several versions possible.  I beleive the version field is
a 16-bit number.
	Note that on Unix systems, the only invalid character in a filename is
the directory separator.  I beleive this to be true on the macintosh as
well.  Under Unix, this opens a lot of security holes, since you can have
filenames with embedded control characters that do odd things.  The
Macintosh was designed with more appropriate file manipulation routines.
--
Anthony J. Stuckey		stuckey@mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu
"And if you frisbee-throw a universe where does it go?" -- Steve Blunt.
GCS/S -d+@ p c(++) l u+ e+(-) m+(*) s+++/-- !n h(*) f+ g+ w+ t+@ r y?
KiboNumber == 1