Comment by qwerty456127
7 years ago
Of course I have only encountered filenames this long a couple times but as for full path like C:\something\something this is very easy.
E.g. "How did you manage? I've never hit the limit in like 20 years." is 63 characters and it still looks like a reasonable title for a book. You may have written or downloaded a book and stored it in a folder named this way in multiple formats (i.e. PDF, EPUB etc) and this can already make something like "C:\Documents and Settings\John Doe\My Documents\My Projects\Books\How did you manage - I've never hit the limit in like 20 years\How did you manage - I've never hit the limit in like 20 years.epub" and this already is 199 characters. Just 60 characters left and 60 characters is as short as "C:\Documents and Settings\John Doe\My Documents", and you might in fact have your book file named a longer way like "John Doe - How did you manage? I've never hit the limit in like 20 years. 2nd edition draft". This is a bit clumsy example but it demonstrates how easily reachable the limit actually is in the real life.
This actually forced me to store my data in c:\a\b\c... (where a, b, and c actually were 1-4-letter acronyms) instead of C:\Documents and Settings\John Doe\My Documents\
Yes, this is how you end up with huge file paths. So don't do that. Obviously. It's not only long in storage terms. Nobody can even read it without getting dizzy.
Name it filepathlimit/filepathlimit.epub or something. Done. You can actually read that. Now if you want the prose, open the damn file. Or use the file explorer which might already show you a more complete title based on the file metadata.
And don't do that "C:\Documents and Settings\John Doe\My Documents\My Projects\Books\". There is no point in storing your things deep in a thousand rabbit holes. It's overzealous hierarchy fetishism. There is no point in creating unreadable paths that wrap around lines like wild. Use D:\Books or something. Or D:\John\Books if you must. Use basic common sense.
> So don't do that
I don't do, but I work with other people's stuff and almost every non-geek does that.
> And don't do that "C:\Documents and Settings\John Doe\My Documents\My Projects\Books\". There is no point in storing your things deep in a thousand rabbit holes
That's the standard way Windows users are meant to store their data (although I don't). What is "\home\jdoe\" on Linux is "C:\Documents and Settings\John Doe\My Documents\" on Windows ("C:\Documents and Settings\John Doe\" actually but not from an ordinary user point of view).
> It's overzealous hierarchy fetishism.
I actually find it sad we are still using hierarchies for that when we could be just using tags and semantic attributes instead (semantically a document file doesn't even need a "file name", the actual document title stored as an atribute or as a record within the file is enough and actually better). Apparently it seems ordinary people are more comfortable with the folder metaphor and hierarchies so WinFS was cancelled and 3rd party tagging and semantic desktop systems are little know.