Re: Long file names in VFAT broken with iocharset=utf8

Albert Cahalan
2007-05-08T04:43:30Z

Andrey Borzenkov writes:

> This was posted in one of Russian forums. It was not possible to
> archive (under Linux, using tar) vfat directory where files had
> long Russian names (really long - over 150 - 170 characters) - tar
> returned stat failure. When looking with plain ls, file names
> appeared truncated.

I have an idea to deal with this, but first a rant...

At two bytes per character, you get 127 characters in a filename.
That's wider than the standard 80-column display, and far wider
than the 28 or 29 characters that an "ls -l" has room for. In a
GUI file manager or file dialog box, you'll have to scroll sideways.
In a web browser directory listing, you'll almost certainly have
to scroll sideways. Must of this even applies to Windows tools.

In other words, this is user error. Somebody thought that a filename
was a place to store a document, probably a README file. What next,
shall we MIME-encode an icon into the filename?

Fix: the vfat driver should use the 8.3 name for such files.