this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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"It's just easier to type" and other lies you believe

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

IIRC older DOS versions were also limited to 8.3 filenames, so even filenames had a max limit of 8 characters + 3 extension. May it was a limitation of the file system, can’t quite remember.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

At one point it was both. At one point they internally added support for longer file names in DOS, and then a later version of the filesystem also started supporting it. I think that on DOS and Windows (iirc even today), they never actually solved it, and paths on Windows and NTFS can only be 256 characters long in total or something (I don’t remember what the exact limit was/is).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

It's 256, unless you enable something in the registry. NTFS supports paths longer than 256, funnily enough.