On Tue, 20 Aug 2002, at 3:09pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> Then you believe incorrectly. Many variants of Unix had a >> 14-character filename limit. There is still a limit today, though >> it's ridiculously large, so as not to matter practically. > > Ahh, 14 characters, that does sound familiar. You're right. It was the > mention of 4 character file names which threw me. Sorry.
The 14-character filename limit *did* exist in some early Unix or Unixes. I do knot know exactly which ones, but it is an oft-cited limit when worrying about "greatest common factors" for heterogeneous systems. I am pretty sure there was never a 4-character filename limit. I can think of many things that would not fit: passwd, login, mount, mkdir, rmdir, issue, fstab ... >> I may only be imagining this, but I could swear it was a predecessor >> to Unix, from whence many of these commands originally came (possibly >> multics? anyone?) that did have a four character filename limit. > > I don't know a lot about multics. Perhaps you're thinking of the 6 > character limitations of node names in DECNET, from whence came the famous > 'decvax' et. al.? I think he is thinking of the five-character limit in the original linker(s) used to develop Unix (which very well may have come from Multics). That five-character limit gave us the infamous creat(2) system call. -- Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do not | | necessarily represent the views or policy of any other person, entity or | | organization. All information is provided without warranty of any kind. | _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
