Re^3: Filenames beyond 260 chars in Perl on WinXP

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.

Comment on Re^3: Filenames beyond 260 chars in Perl on WinXP

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Re^4: Filenames beyond 260 chars in Perl on WinXP by ienne (Novice) on Nov 08, 2009 at 14:27 UTC
My apologies--I did not mean to be ungenerous to Perl, which has helped me solving quite a bit of issues efficiently and elegantly with limited effort, nor to the developers, who make a splendid job. Yet, I use both various forms of Unix (well, lately it is Linux) and WinXP, and I find in the latter some limitations which seem to come right out of the '80s. The 260-char for a pathname is one of them, and probably I am not alone thinking it a bit ridiculous if the API supports "somehow" much longer lengths and the file system absolutely and perfectly does. I would have just found splendid if Perl could circumvent some of these "artificial" limitations, as it seems possible. But I agree--in the big picture it is probably a low priority and my search on the web suggests it is not a very common problem for people. To Corion: I'd love to, but I am too incompetent to even try. Even for my own purpose, I guess I will simply have to run the scripts on a Linux box. Thanks, p.	[reply]

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Re^4: Filenames beyond 260 chars in Perl on WinXP
by ienne (Novice) on Nov 08, 2009 at 14:27 UTC

My apologies--I did not mean to be ungenerous to Perl, which has helped me solving quite a bit of issues efficiently and elegantly with limited effort, nor to the developers, who make a splendid job. Yet, I use both various forms of Unix (well, lately it is Linux) and WinXP, and I find in the latter some limitations which seem to come right out of the '80s. The 260-char for a pathname is one of them, and probably I am not alone thinking it a bit ridiculous if the API supports "somehow" much longer lengths and the file system absolutely and perfectly does. I would have just found splendid if Perl could circumvent some of these "artificial" limitations, as it seems possible. But I agree--in the big picture it is probably a low priority and my search on the web suggests it is not a very common problem for people.

To Corion: I'd love to, but I am too incompetent to even try. Even for my own purpose, I guess I will simply have to run the scripts on a Linux box.

Thanks,

[reply]