in reply to Filenames beyond 260 chars in Perl on WinXP

Those 260 chars are a limit of Windows since the old ages. There are some tricks for breaking the barrier, by using the (most times) shorter aliases of longer names (I used that trick in deepcopy), but it does not help forever.

Why do you thing you need names that long? Do you put information into the filename that belong elsewhere? Use a meta-data file, or stuff the data into a database.

Alexander

--
Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)
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Re^2: Filenames beyond 260 chars in Perl on WinXP
by ienne (Novice) on Nov 08, 2009 at 14:40 UTC

    Thanks, I am having a look to deepcopy, it may prove useful and efficient for me to play similar tricks.

    As for why I need long pathnames, I guess it is not a germane issue here, but you are essentially right: I put in pathnames information which could (and perhaps should) be stored elsewhere. In a nutshell, (1) standard meta-data tags are all but standard content-wise and every second program thinks to be in the right to mess them up and be more clever than the previous tagger, and (2) a home-cooked database storage is invisible to all but my programs whereas directory structures are visible to all, in every OS, in every system, and I can control them quite freely. Not elegant, not the ideal solution, questionable under many aspects, but works quite fine for me--were it not for some limitations of some OSs. Luckily there are other OSs readily available around. But it is an exquisitely personal choice dictated by practical reasons--in principle you are probably perfectly right.

    Thanks,

    p.
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