From: joel@wam.umd.edu (Joel M. Hoffman) Subject: Re: Aww, do I hafta? Date: 9 Feb 1992 01:16:44 GMT
In article <1992Feb7.113503.1@cc.curtin.edu.au> nmurrayr@cc.curtin.edu.au writes:
>In article <1992Feb1.031232.25299@athena.mit.edu>, satishc@microsoft.com writes:
>
>> [re file lengths over 14 char.]
>
> Now I'll state at the outset that I have VERY little experience with Unix
>or any of its derivatives. 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.
First of all, it's very easy to get file lentgths > 14 char. Just
by way of example, consider ``linux-0.12.tar.Z'' I think that's the
most reasonable name for the compressed tar file of release 0.12 of
linux. No?
Most shells have a completion feature (TAB in tcsh) that complete
as much of the file name as possible. So, e.g., if there's only
one linux file in the current directory, you can type ls -l linux[TAB]
and the shell will do the rest.
-Joel
(joel@wam.umd.edu)