494
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
494 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
58125 readers
3820 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
You like diving 12 folders deep to find the file you're after? I feel like there's better, more efficient ways to be organized using metadata, but maybe I'm wrong.
Not OP, but I occasionally come across this issue at work, where some user complains they they are unable to access a file/folder because of the limit. You often find this in medium-large organisations with many regions and divisions and departments etc. Usually they would create a shortcut to their team/project's folder space so they don't have to manually navigate to it each time. The folder structure might be quite nested, but it's organized logically, it makes sense. Better than dumping millions of files into a single folder.
Anyways, this isn't actually an NTFS limit, but a Windows API limit. There's even a registry value[1] you can change to lift the limit, but the problem is that it can crash legacy programs or lead to unexpected behavior, so large organisations (like ours) shy away from the change.
C:\Users\axexandriaanastasiachristianson\Downloads\some_git_repo\src\...You run into the file parth limit all the fucking time if you're a developer at an organization that enforces fullname usernames.
I think I've spotted the real problem.
People have been talking about the real problem from the beginning of the thread: small character limit on file paths.
Only if you go into settings, disable the safety measures and change it. And some apps might break.
No, the default file path limit is 256 characters. And I don’t mean file name. Full file path.
I remember I had to change a setting when using Windows. And it even showed me an “Are you sure?” dialog. It wasn’t that long ago. Is that not a thing anymore?
I would be pissed if they made me use such a ridiculously long login name at work. Mine is twelve characters and that's already a pain in the ass (but it's a huge company and I have a really common name, so I guess all the shorter variations were already taken).
Edit: Also, I checked it's really very simple to enable 32kb paths in recent versions of Windows.
If your name consists of non-ASCII characters, like Thai words or Arabic or Chinese, it's pretty easy to rack up >15 bytes in your username alone.
Metadata is slow, messy, and volatile. Also, shortcuts are a thing.