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From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: tar crash when filenames greaterthan 14 characters?
Message-ID: <13302@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 5 Jul 90 03:59:01 GMT
References: <1684.2690c9cf@hamavnet.com>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.
Lines: 9

In article <1684.2690c9cf@hamavnet.com> young@hamavnet.com writes:
>When I tar in the files the ones with more than fourteen characters
>cause the utility to bomb with an error.   Should not I just get
>truncated files.

Of course not -- "tar" asks the kernel to create the file with the
name specified, and the kernel correctly reports that it cannot.
The danger of automatically truncating the name is that files
having the same truncated name may get overwritten.