"Linux has a 255 bytes limitation for file names (this translates to just 63 fou...

blibble · on Feb 25, 2019

I'd not come across this before, but it appears to be true:

    $ touch $(printf 'a%.0s' {1..255})
    $ touch $(printf 'a%.0s' {1..256})
    touch: cannot touch 'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa': File name too long

(on ext4 and ZFS anyway)

rossy · on Feb 25, 2019

File and folder names can't be longer than 255 UTF-8 code units in Linux, which means they can contain 255 US-ASCII characters, but only 127 Cyrillic characters, 85 Chinese characters, or 63 emoji. In Windows it's different, because file names can contain up to 255 UTF-16 code units. This is 255 characters in almost every language (but only 127 emoji.) So, if you create a file name with 100 Chinese characters in Windows, you can't transfer it to Linux (or upload it to a Linux web server, for example.)

Windows, on the other hand, has problems when the full path to the file (eg. C:\folder\file) is more than 259 UTF-16 code units, but it's getting better at this, and newer Windows apps normally handle longer paths just fine.

vbarrielle · on Feb 25, 2019

I'm curious how one gets long names from a windows pc given the path length limits on windows https://stackoverflow.com/a/1880453

Maybe I'm not understanding that limit correctly but it looks like the whole path cannot be longer than 260 characters. I've hit that limit when transferring files from linux to windows.

As you mention, the linux limit is in bytes, so the issue could appear in some character sets, but it still looks like the path limits are a lot more drastic under windows.

kkarakk · on Feb 25, 2019

unicode version of windows api lets you do longer paths -upto 30k(it is transparently handled in windows explorer)

example of a function that uses it- https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/api/fileapi...

chopin · on Feb 25, 2019

I wondered about this as well, especially as Windows (10) still has issues with deeply nested (=long paths) structures. Especially in conjunction with OneDrive (forced upon me at work) it's an annoyance.