Re: Rationale for aligning data on even bytes in a Unix shell file?

On 06.05.2025 20:01, BGB wrote:

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The partial rationale here being that the directory entries in this case
were fixed size (like FAT, albeit with longer names), and this could
potentially make the difference between using a single directory entry
or needing a more complex LFN style scheme. Though, in this case, the
default name length is 48, and it is rare for a filename to not fit into
48 bytes.

You mean rare in your application areas?

This appears to me like a very conservative size. While I'd agree
that it's probably a sensible value for own files with explicitly
chosen file names a lot of files that are downloaded regularly do
have longer file names. A quick check of my "Documents" directory
(that contains both, downloaded files and own files) shows a ratio
of 1563:629, i.e. roughly about 30% files of "document" type with
lengths > 48 (there's no files with a file name length > 128).

I recall someone here recently spoke about chosen lengths of 255
(or some such)for file names, which seems to be plenty, OTOH.

Janis

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