From: jds@cs.umd.edu (James da Silva) Subject: Re: Aww, do I hafta? Date: 7 Feb 1992 15:33:58 GMT
nmurrayr@cc.curtin.edu.au writes:
> Now I'll state at the outset that I have VERY little experience with
> Unix or any of its derivatives.
I'll forgive you, then. :-)
> I wonder, however, just how useful very long filenames actually are: one
> thing that does annoy me when I do encounter a Unix system is having to
> type in 20 or 30 characters when I need to access a file. When these
> filenames are in mixed upper or lower case, it just makes it worse, and
> after several attempts at typing in one of these abominations, I'm
> afraid I'm prone to raining some rather violent curses down upon the
> heads of the perpetrators.
>
> I'm willing to believe that I've missed something somewhere along the line.
> If I have, could someone please explain it to me?
What you need is not short filenames, but a decent shell; one with filename
completion. Tcsh (and bash and ksh I think) will complete filenames for
you if you hit a key (tab in tcsh), also, if you hit ^D in the middle of
typing a filename, the shell will show you all the files that match that
prefix. Very nice, and problem solved.
I think _most_ people would agree that 14 characters just isn't enough for
consistent naming schemes. For example, "linux-0.12.tar.Z". Oops, too
long, we'll have to do some non-intuitive name-scrunching. The ideal would
be to allow names long enough that we never have to think about the limit
in practice.
So, the question is, how long is enough. Should we just bump the dir size
from 16 bytes to 32? Well, that's _probably_ fine in _many_ cases. How
about 64 bytes? Yeah, surely that's enough. Certainly the 255 char
filename limit of the BSD filesystem is as good as infinity for
_human-generated_ filenames.
Well, as it turns out, a variable-length directory is usually more space
efficient than even the 16 byte entry, and is much better than 32 or 64
byte entries.
Of course, it's possible to argue that variable-length dirents are not
worth the added complexity in the filesystem, but for most people the
lifting of such an arbitrary limit as 14 is nothing but good news.
Cheers,
Jaime
............................................................................
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