As a full time desktop Linux user since 1999 (the actual year of the Linux desktop, I swear) I wish all you Windows folks the best of luck on the next clean install š
ā¦and Happy 30th Birthday āNew Technologyā File System!
Are you writing parahraphs for folder/file names? Thatās one āissueā I never had problem with.
Maybe enterprises need a solution for it but thatās a very different use case from most end users.
Improvements are always welcome but saying itās āridiculously shortā makes the problem sound worse than it is.
File paths. Not just the filename, the entire directory path, including the filename. Itās way too easy to run up against limit if youāre actually organized.
It might be 255 characters for the entire path?
Iāve run into it at work where I donāt get to choose many elements. Thanks āMy Name - OneDriveā and people who insist on embedding file information into filenames.
The limit was 260. The OS and the filesystem support more. You have to enable a registry key and apps need to have a manifest which says they understand file paths longer than 260 characters. So while it hasnāt been a limitation for awhile, as long as apps were coded to support lesser path lengths it will continue to be a problem. There needs to be an conversion mechanism like Windows 95 had so that apps could continue to use short file names. Internally the app could use short path names while the rest of the OS was no longer held back.
You like diving 12 folders deep to find the file youāre after? I feel like thereās better, more efficient ways to be organized using metadata, but maybe Iām wrong.
Not OP, but I occasionally come across this issue at work, where some user complains they they are unable to access a file/folder because of the limit. You often find this in medium-large organisations with many regions and divisions and departments etc. Usually they would create a shortcut to their team/projectās folder space so they donāt have to manually navigate to it each time. The folder structure might be quite nested, but itās organized logically, it makes sense. Better than dumping millions of files into a single folder.
Anyways, this isnāt actually an NTFS limit, but a Windows API limit. Thereās even a registry value[1] you can change to lift the limit, but the problem is that it can crash legacy programs or lead to unexpected behavior, so large organisations (like ours) shy away from the change.
C:\Users\axexandriaanastasiachristianson\Downloads\some_git_repo\src\...
You run into the file parth limit all the fucking time if youāre a developer at an organization that enforces fullname usernames.
