Re: Long filenames in DOS/Windows and Unix/Linux (Was: Piping to stdin)

Am 31.08.24 um 07:57 schrieb Kenny McCormack:

     2) Spaces in filenames are pretty much a necessity from the end-user
POV (but see below).  Yes, it makes things hard for us on the admin
side of the game.  I have always thought that the right answer is
to have both - a short name that is usable for the admin side of
the game and a long label that the user can work with.  There are
two solutions of this nature that I like:
    a) The "Extend a name" idea.  Where you have short names at the
filesystem level, but then have a database linked to that
that allows the user to think that long, descriptive
filenames are supported.
  A long long time ago, there was a DOS product called
"Extend a name" that did this.  Also, 4DOS (and later
versions) does this.

OS/2 also had the "display file name" approach for invalid file names.

    b) The way VFAT does it (and NTFS emulates) - where, for any
file with a long name, there is an 8.3 filename (usually
with weird characters in the filename) as well, and either
filename is usable by programs.  This is one place where I
think Windows really gets it right (and Unix could learn
from it).
 

In fact both variants caused at least as much problems as they solved.
First of all the relation between the two file names is usually lost, if a system that is not aware of them is used to move or copy a file.
Secondly the raw file names in the backend can cause significant false positives with wildcard matching. E.g. when you delete *2.txt it is likely that a bunch of mangled file names match too.
Last but not least sometimes the display file name is used to translate system folder names into the users language. Besides the false positive problem this makes it difficult to find the raw name for the user.
(Of course, translated system folders like "Programme" or "Arbeitsoberfläche" caused other problems.)
At the end I always disabled the two file mane approach wherever possible. (NTFS, Samba ...)
If an old OS is not aware of accessing certain file names, it should not be used for this kind of data.
Marcel