Re: Case Insensitive File Systems -- Torvalds Hates Them

On Fri, 02 May 2025 00:15:50 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

Back in the days of 8.3 file names, someone described the original Mac
as a machine where you could write a letter to Grandma in the file name.

The original MFS, “Macintosh File System” (on the single-sided floppies
with the “folders” that were faked by the Finder) allowed 63-character
names. The later HFS, “Hierarchical File System”, with true subdirectories
and support for larger volumes, for some reason reduced this limit to 31.

But why should newlines not be allowed in file names?

 
Yes, but sooner or later you're going to get bit.  We encountered a bug
in the sort routine used by Micro Focus COBOL.  By default it created
ridiculously small work files, so when we tried sorting a very large
file, the numeric portion of work file names (of the form "worknnn")
ran up to 999, wrapped around, and carried into the alphanumeric portion
-
which ran all the way up the ASCII chart, wrapped around to \0, and
worked up from there.  After the inevitable crash, we had 12,000 work
files to get rid of, which had just about any character value in their
names.
What a mess.

Weren’t they all in a temporary work directory?