File Names In Windows Explorer

[Darth Raider]

My question is does anyone know how to change settings to where a file name
can be as long as you need it to be In other words some files I have when I
go to rename them I can only put so much of the file name in when renaming
before running out of room, Anyway to fix that without shortening the name?

 

[Char Jackson]

My question is does anyone know how to change settings to where a file name
can be as long as you need it to be In other words some files I have when I
go to rename them I can only put so much of the file name in when renaming
before running out of room, Anyway to fix that without shortening the name?

I don't think you can. What length were you hoping for?

 

[Bob I]

My question is does anyone know how to change settings to where a file
name can be as long as you need it to be In other words some files I
have when I go to rename them I can only put so much of the file name in
when renaming before running out of room, Anyway to fix that without
shortening the name?

If you can't name a file in 235 characters, you need to re-evaluate
your file naming method.

 

[Darth Raider]

My file naming method works just fine, I was just wondering if anyone knew a
way to change settings and such to where you could use a longer file
name...apparently you don't, But thanks for your time.

"Bob I" wrote in message

My question is does anyone know how to change settings to where a file
name can be as long as you need it to be In other words some files I
have when I go to rename them I can only put so much of the file name in
when renaming before running out of room, Anyway to fix that without
shortening the name?

If you can't name a file in 235 characters, you need to re-evaluate
your file naming method.

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

If you can't name a file in 235 characters, you need to re-evaluate
your file naming method.

Truer words were never spoken...but:

I just looked it up in Help, and found that the total path name is
limited to 260 characters, so a deeply nested file could end up with a
very short allowed name. This seems not quite right to me, but you
obviously can't argue with Help

Of course, if you're working within a directory without an explicit
path, the limit to the name alone is perhaps 235 or 260 or something
like that. Heaven help you if you need to write the full path name in a
command, though.

I looked in my O'Reilly "Windows Vista in a Nutshell". It said pathname
lengths depend on the file system, but didn't list anything :-(

 

[R. C. White]

?Hi, Gene.

...pathname lengths depend on the file system...

Rather than argue among ourselves, why not get the official word?

Naming Files, Paths, and Namespaces
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247(VS.85).aspx

You were computing in the days of 8.3 filenames, weren't you, Gene? (Note
that the MSDN article, updated 10/15/10, still discusses "directories", not
"folders". One sentence from that article says, "In the Windows API (with
some exceptions discussed in the following paragraphs), the maximum length
for a path is MAX_PATH, which is defined as 260 characters.") We discussed
some of this topic in the Quicken newsgroup
(alt.comp.software.financial.quicken) just yesterday. While my comments
there are not squarely on point here, you might like to reminisce. I said
there (omitting the Quicken-specific stuff):

<paste>
Filename rules have evolved over the years. Your comment motivated me to
get out my antique users' manuals from my original TRS-80 (1977) and its
Level I BASIC, Level II Basic (1978) and the original TRS-DOS when floppy
disks came along (also 1978).

Level I had no filenames at all. We just had to watch the counter on our
music cassette recorder and issue the CLOAD command when it got to the right
spot on the tape.

Level II had one-character filenames, such as "D". BASIC was smart enough
to just let the tape run past files A, B and C and then load File D when the
tape finally got that far.

TRS-DOS adopted the 8.3 pattern: a 1-to-8 character name plus, optionally,
a 1-to-3 character extension - separated by a slash (/), not a period. The
Directory on the disk reserved exactly 11 places to store the 8 and 3
characters; the / wasn't stored but was inserted by the system when it was
needed for display or printout.

I'm not sure which OS actually started the 8.3 pattern. Maybe it was CP/M,
the predecessor of MS-DOS. But the pattern persisted until Long File Names
(LFN) became available in the 90's. I'm too lazy to look it up, but it was
about MS-DOS 6.2. Even after LFNs were allowed, though, MS-DOS created a
Short File Name (SFN), also known as an 8.3 filename, for any LFN that did
not meet the SFN rules. Even today, in a Command Prompt window, we can use
the Dir command (from before Directories became Folders) with the /x switch
to see a directory with a column of SFNs before the column of LFNs.
</paste>

Personally, in my one-man one-computer no-net-but-the-Internet environment,
I've never felt constrained, even by the 8.3 limits. And I seldom have deep
folder layers that build up to a very long pathname. (Except here in
WLMail, when it recovers a very deep tree of subfolders in Recovered Items
:>( Or in some of Win7's own system folders.)

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP (2002-9/30/10)
Windows Live Mail Version 2011 (Build 15.4.3502.0922) in Win7 Ultimate x64
SP1 beta


"Gene E. Bloch" wrote in message

If you can't name a file in 235 characters, you need to re-evaluate
your file naming method.

Truer words were never spoken...but:

I just looked it up in Help, and found that the total path name is
limited to 260 characters, so a deeply nested file could end up with a
very short allowed name. This seems not quite right to me, but you
obviously can't argue with Help

Of course, if you're working within a directory without an explicit
path, the limit to the name alone is perhaps 235 or 260 or something
like that. Heaven help you if you need to write the full path name in a
command, though.

I looked in my O'Reilly "Windows Vista in a Nutshell". It said pathname
lengths depend on the file system, but didn't list anything :-(

 

[Bob I]

here's how to get around it, but you won't be doing it through the GUI
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247(VS.85).aspx#maxpath

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

?Hi, Gene.


Rather than argue among ourselves, why not get the official word?

Naming Files, Paths, and Namespaces
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247(VS.85).aspx

You were computing in the days of 8.3 filenames, weren't you, Gene? (Note
that the MSDN article, updated 10/15/10, still discusses "directories", not
"folders". One sentence from that article says, "In the Windows API (with
some exceptions discussed in the following paragraphs), the maximum length
for a path is MAX_PATH, which is defined as 260 characters.") We discussed
some of this topic in the Quicken newsgroup
(alt.comp.software.financial.quicken) just yesterday. While my comments
there are not squarely on point here, you might like to reminisce. I said
there (omitting the Quicken-specific stuff):

<paste>
Filename rules have evolved over the years. Your comment motivated me to
get out my antique users' manuals from my original TRS-80 (1977) and its
Level I BASIC, Level II Basic (1978) and the original TRS-DOS when floppy
disks came along (also 1978).

Level I had no filenames at all. We just had to watch the counter on our
music cassette recorder and issue the CLOAD command when it got to the right
spot on the tape.

Level II had one-character filenames, such as "D". BASIC was smart enough
to just let the tape run past files A, B and C and then load File D when the
tape finally got that far.

TRS-DOS adopted the 8.3 pattern: a 1-to-8 character name plus, optionally,
a 1-to-3 character extension - separated by a slash (/), not a period. The
Directory on the disk reserved exactly 11 places to store the 8 and 3
characters; the / wasn't stored but was inserted by the system when it was
needed for display or printout.

I'm not sure which OS actually started the 8.3 pattern. Maybe it was CP/M,
the predecessor of MS-DOS. But the pattern persisted until Long File Names
(LFN) became available in the 90's. I'm too lazy to look it up, but it was
about MS-DOS 6.2. Even after LFNs were allowed, though, MS-DOS created a
Short File Name (SFN), also known as an 8.3 filename, for any LFN that did
not meet the SFN rules. Even today, in a Command Prompt window, we can use
the Dir command (from before Directories became Folders) with the /x switch
to see a directory with a column of SFNs before the column of LFNs.
</paste>

Personally, in my one-man one-computer no-net-but-the-Internet environment,
I've never felt constrained, even by the 8.3 limits. And I seldom have deep
folder layers that build up to a very long pathname. (Except here in
WLMail, when it recovers a very deep tree of subfolders in Recovered Items
:>( Or in some of Win7's own system folders.)

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP (2002-9/30/10)
Windows Live Mail Version 2011 (Build 15.4.3502.0922) in Win7 Ultimate x64
SP1 beta


"Gene E. Bloch" wrote in message



Truer words were never spoken...but:

I just looked it up in Help, and found that the total path name is
limited to 260 characters, so a deeply nested file could end up with a
very short allowed name. This seems not quite right to me, but you
obviously can't argue with Help

Of course, if you're working within a directory without an explicit
path, the limit to the name alone is perhaps 235 or 260 or something
like that. Heaven help you if you need to write the full path name in a
command, though.

I looked in my O'Reilly "Windows Vista in a Nutshell". It said pathname
lengths depend on the file system, but didn't list anything :-(

I already read the above link a few minutes ago, when I saw it in Bob
I's post in this thread. It is informative, but a bit confusing to me
now that I am not writing code with the older API's, and have little new
experience to use in interpreting the paper.

I do like the idea of file names of ~32767 characters, though. Now I can
finally get organized. All my text files will be empty, and their names
will be what would have been the contents. Whee!

Anyway, most of my programming was in DOS and Unix and such, where
things were seemingly simpler (suits me!).

 

[Tim Slattery]

My question is does anyone know how to change settings to where a file name
can be as long as you need it to be In other words some files I have when I
go to rename them I can only put so much of the file name in when renaming
before running out of room, Anyway to fix that without shortening the name?

Wikipedia's article on NTFS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS) gives
the maximum file name length as 255 UTF-16 code units. That's it, no
exceptions. And if you actually have a file name that long, you will
doubtless run into problems with some programs that can't handle
extremely long paths.

 

[Leythos]

My question is does anyone know how to change settings to where a file name
can be as long as you need it to be In other words some files I have when I
go to rename them I can only put so much of the file name in when renaming
before running out of room, Anyway to fix that without shortening the name?

Like others have and will tell you, you're making a serious mistake if
you need longer file names to properly group your files - in fact, if
your file name is longer than 20 characters I would say you're making a
mistake.

I've seen file names like "Dr. Smith, P.HD., CERT I, CERT II, Bio,
DOC.DOCX"

It's amazing that microsoft permits this kind of crap when that file
name would have violated any reasonable standard years ago.

There is no reason to allow more than 1 period and certainly not any
punctuation in file names - it should be limited to Letters, Numbers,
and the Underscore character (to be used in place of a space).

There are so many things that don't work well with punctuation.

We had a firewall that blocked files sent by a web hosting provider, log
reports - something like this "Webcompany.com, your report.xls.pdf" -
the firewall saw it as a .COM file attachment and blocked it (which is
reasonable), but the tripple extension crap is just plain bad.

 

[Bob I]

Like others have and will tell you, you're making a serious mistake if
you need longer file names to properly group your files - in fact, if
your file name is longer than 20 characters I would say you're making a
mistake.

I've seen file names like "Dr. Smith, P.HD., CERT I, CERT II, Bio,
DOC.DOCX"

It's amazing that microsoft permits this kind of crap when that file
name would have violated any reasonable standard years ago.

There is no reason to allow more than 1 period and certainly not any
punctuation in file names - it should be limited to Letters, Numbers,
and the Underscore character (to be used in place of a space).

There are so many things that don't work well with punctuation.

We had a firewall that blocked files sent by a web hosting provider, log
reports - something like this "Webcompany.com, your report.xls.pdf" -
the firewall saw it as a .COM file attachment and blocked it (which is
reasonable), but the tripple extension crap is just plain bad.

Along that line, you should see some of the weird problems caused by
people using apostrophes in folder names.

 

[Andrew Rossmann]

I'm not sure which OS actually started the 8.3 pattern. Maybe it was CP/M,
the predecessor of MS-DOS. But the pattern persisted until Long File Names
(LFN) became available in the 90's. I'm too lazy to look it up, but it was
about MS-DOS 6.2. Even after LFNs were allowed, though, MS-DOS created a
Short File Name (SFN), also known as an 8.3 filename, for any LFN that did
not meet the SFN rules. Even today, in a Command Prompt window, we can use
the Dir command (from before Directories became Folders) with the /x switch
to see a directory with a column of SFNs before the column of LFNs.

I believe LFN's on FAT partitions were introduced with NT 3.1 or 3.5. I
believe HPFS and NTFS always supported long names. I think some later
DOS's and Windows 3.1 had some basic support, or at least wouldn't
mangle the bizarre way they were stored in the directory. It was Windows
95 that fully supported it, but only when Windows was running. Support
was again minimal if you exited to DOS mode (not a DOS prompt.)