You are not being very generous. Perl is written in C, and the C standard defines a constant FILENAME_MAX which is set to 260 in the Microsoft header files.

There is another Microsoft specific constant called MAX_PATH, and to quote the MSDN: "In the Windows API, the maximum length for a path is MAX_PATH, which is defined as 260 characters."

Exceptions are when using the Unicode interfaces and WCHARS, as you imply, which give a theoretical filename maximum of 32,767 characters. The sting in the tail of using such filenames is that there are several Microsoft APIs that do not support them; quoting the MSDN again: "It is possible to create a path with the Windows API that the shell user interface might not be able to interpret properly.". I don't think it is unreasonable that supporting such filenames has not been a priority.

In reply to Re^3: Filenames beyond 260 chars in Perl on WinXP by cdarke
in thread Filenames beyond 260 chars in Perl on WinXP by ienne

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