UNIX Arcana [was Re: Perl (or Unix vs. MS, actually) ]

bscott at ntisys.com bscott at ntisys.com
Tue Aug 20 16:20:29 EDT 2002


On Tue, 20 Aug 2002, at 3:09pm, pll at lanminds.com wrote:
>> Then you believe incorrectly.  Many variants of Unix had a
>> 14-character filename limit.  There is still a limit today, though
>> it's ridiculously large, so as not to matter practically.
> 
> Ahh, 14 characters, that does sound familiar.  You're right.  It was the
> mention of 4 character file names which threw me.  Sorry.

  The 14-character filename limit *did* exist in some early Unix or Unixes.  
I do knot know exactly which ones, but it is an oft-cited limit when
worrying about "greatest common factors" for heterogeneous systems.

  I am pretty sure there was never a 4-character filename limit.  I can
think of many things that would not fit: passwd, login, mount, mkdir, rmdir,
issue, fstab ...

>> I may only be imagining this, but I could swear it was a predecessor
>> to Unix, from whence many of these commands originally came (possibly
>> multics?  anyone?) that did have a four character filename limit.
> 
> I don't know a lot about multics.  Perhaps you're thinking of the 6
> character limitations of node names in DECNET, from whence came the famous
> 'decvax' et. al.?

  I think he is thinking of the five-character limit in the original
linker(s) used to develop Unix (which very well may have come from Multics).  
That five-character limit gave us the infamous creat(2) system call.

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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