Topic: File Name Length Limit on Mac

[Vincent]

I use e-smith 4.12, and all files on the file-server with more than 31 characters in their name length are not showing up at all on the mac clients (MacOs 9).

Any solution ??
Thanks

[Grub]

that is the max you can get with linux :~~(

[Vincent]

I create files with long filenames (more than 31 chr$) under W98, that I record on the e-smith file-server. Those files are correctly viewed with W98 client (with all the chr$), and not visibleat all with Mac client...

[Grub]

you can always try to make a symbolic link to the file with a "~" in it or a number at the end

[Julian Luton]

Deav Vincent,
I have the same problem with my server. The thing is that on a netatalk implementation I used before the server simply truncated the file name so that it was mac legal (ie. 31 characters) but it seems that e-smith/netatalk just refuses to display it.

Possible bug?

Yours,
Julian

[Richard Bruce]

I'm having the opposite problem to the above!  We have a mixed bed of users, some using PC's (Win95 & 98) and some using Mac's. I use the e-smith-5 (OK SME-5 then!) box to enable users to swap files etc. I have some file names, created on PC's, that are 31 characters long, and they display just fine on a Mac. However we have some Mac created files with 25 character long names. These display fine on the Mac's, but whenever a PC user looks at them the filename is truncated at about the 10th character (haven't counted) with a tilde (~) and then random characters, as if the filename is too long. I could understand if this happened the other way round, as Win95 has a longer legal filename length than a Mac, but this has me stumped!

Any ideas? This is driving me barmy!

Richard Bruce

[Rich Lafferty]

Grub wrote:
>
> that is the max you can get with linux :~~(

Close, but not exactly; that's the max you can get in the Mac OS.

Cheers,
 
  -Rich

[Rich Lafferty]

Richard Bruce wrote:
>
> I'm having the opposite problem to the above!  We have a
> mixed bed of users, some using PC's (Win95 & 98) and some
> using Mac's. I use the e-smith-5 (OK SME-5 then!) box to
> enable users to swap files etc. I have some file names,
> created on PC's, that are 31 characters long, and they
> display just fine on a Mac. However we have some Mac created
> files with 25 character long names.

What are the filenames according to the Mac?

  -Rich

[Uwe]

OS 9 and OS X at present cannot recognise filenames greater than  31 characters - including the . (dot) and any extention - if those files are not on a local hard disk.

File: "And now is the time for all good folk.doc" will be invisible to the Mac as it is longer than 31 characters.

We came accross the same problem and spoke to the Mac experts about it.  

They stated that it will be corrected in a soon to be released patch for OS-X but will remain in OS9 as it relies on Appletalk and not TCP/IP. OS-X can use TCP/IP or Appletalk.

The problem appears to be Appletalk truncating the filenames.

Sorry this message doesn't solve your problem.

The short term solution:- Use shorter file names.