Microsoft righted an age-old “wrong” (at least for those who geek out about disk formatting) earlier this week. With its latest Windows 11 Insider Canary Preview Build, the company increased the maximum FAT32 partition size limit from 32GB to 2TB when using the command line.
Linux might have a similar file name restriction, but what’s more important IMO, is the obnoxious file path restrictions NTFS has.
Naming a file less than 255 chars is a lot easier than keeping its path down.
Limiting file name is one thing, but dealing with limited path lengths when trying to move a custies folder full of subdir on subdirs is obnoxious when the share name its being transferred to makes it just too long.
Can’t you work around that with the extended length prefix of
\\?\(\\?\C:\whateverlongpathhere\)? Though admittedly, it is a pain in the ass to use.(edited for clarity and formatting)
You can also enable long paths in w10/11 (30,000+ characters). Instructions are here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/maximum-file-path-limitation?tabs=registry
That would unfortunately require me to edit GPO I have non control over. I could temporarily knock it out with regedit but I don’t know if it’d be tossed next gpupdate, I’d have to check.
Bummer. The '\?' prefix will work regardless of registry setting, though it’s a pain to remember each time.
True. Problem is, moving from more restricted system to less restricted system is a breeze, but painful otherwise. Linux is in a position where it would benefit from any little thing. People trying to switch to Linux will find path length feels like an upgrade, but file name limitation is clearly a downgrade.
What are you guys naming your files anyways? No more than four words in lower snake case, as the Machine Spirit intended.
I guess something like
ようこそ『追放者ギルド』へ ～無能なＳランクパーティがどんどん有能な冒険者を追放するので、最弱を集めて最強ギルドを創ります～ 1 (ドラゴンコミックスエイジ) - 荒木 佑輔.epub- 92 characters, but 246 bytes. Where on Windows this file hits 35% of the limit, on Linux it hits 96%.The file is not some rare case. It’s from a torrent, uploaded somewhere just today. There are tons of files like this with slightly or much longer names. As of 2024, they can’t be served by Linux. Not in a pure file form, that is.
Yeah I suppose that would get in the way.