Long filenames (was: What kinds of things would you want in the GNU OS?)

[Peter da Silva]

In article <629 at crdgw1.crd.ge.com>, barnett at crdgw1.crd.ge.com (Bruce G. Barnett) writes:
> In article <9422 at alice.UUCP>, andrew at alice (Andrew Hume) writes:
> Example:
> 	If I wanted to print out all weekly sa -in and sa -im reports
> for machines vaxA and SunB that ocurred in January, I could type:

> My Method:
> 	print {vaxA,sunB}*sa-i[nm]*Jan*WEEK

> Your method:
> 	print `awk '$2 ~ /vaxA|sunB/ && $3 == "sa" && $4 ~/i[nm]/ && \
> 		$5 ~ /Jan.*WEEK/  {print $1}' data `

My method:
	print {vaxA,sunB}/sa/i[nm]/Jan/*WEEK

Disadvantages with your method:

	You need lots of long file names.

	'ls -C' is useless.

	'ls' takes forever.

> If I had to re-implement my report scheme on a system with filenames
> less than 14 characters, it would have taken me twice as long to do it.

Not at all. It would take you no longer... hierarchical directories are
a wonderful tool.

14 characters is getting a little cramped, but I've never run out of 30.

> Another example is the large USENET archive I keep.
> First of all, I store old articles using the format
> 	./news.group/yy-mm/article-id

Why not /news/group/...?

> There is a one-line summary of the subject line in the file
> 	./LOGS/news.group

./LOGS/news/group...

> There are so many advantages to this scheme. Articles are always a known
> depth from the top (comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d vs. comp/binaries/ibm/pc/d).

The only problem with this is that UNIX wildcards don't support ellipses.
One of the very few VMS features I genuinely miss... and a much more useful
tool than superlongfilenames. But surely you don't find "find" to be THAT
hard to use.

> [14 characters] would have make the task more difficult, more complex, more
> inflexible and more inefficient.

Not at all.
-- 
Peter da Silva, Xenix Support, Ferranti International Controls Corporation.

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