Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sdd.hp.com!hp-pcd!hpfcso!mjs
From: mjs@hpfcso.HP.COM (Marc Sabatella)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp
Subject: Re: how to get longer file names?
Message-ID: <7370265@hpfcso.HP.COM>
Date: 10 Dec 90 18:33:04 GMT
References: <1720012@hpbbi4.BBN.HP.COM>
Organization: Hewlett-Packard, Fort Collins, CO, USA
Lines: 37

>Also, if you're in the business of creating libs, be warned
>that ar will NOT correctly archive files that have 15+ char filenames.
>HP knows this, so maybe there's a patch.  Else you wait for 8.0.

This is part of the design of the portable ar(1) format, I'm afraid.  Domain
supports long filenames in a non-standard way (ie, Domain archives with long
filenames are not completely portable to other systems), but no other available
Un*x's I'm aware of (not SunOS, BSD, or SVR3) can handle long filenames in an
ar(1) archive.  SVR4 has support for this, however, and we expect that other
vendors will adopt this support soon.  We hope to incorporate it in a future
release.

Different vendors react to long filenames in different ways.  HP-UX looks at
the full filename for comparisons and then truncates for storage, so if for
example you try to replace "thisisalongfilename", your filename will not match
the truncated version in the library.  Your file will be inserted into the
archive with its name truncated (thus there will be two versions of your file
in the archive).  The alternative would have been to overwrite any file with
a similar name, but then you might accidentally overwrite
"thisisalongfilename1" with "thisisalongfilename2", losing the original file.
With the current behavior, if your filename is longer than 14 characters,
either delete the original file from the archive before inserting the new
version, or temporarily rename the new file to truncated name before replacing
it.

Note if you do have files that are not unique in the first 14 characters, HP's
ar(1) will indeed let you keep them both in the same archive, and ld(1) can
handle that.  They will show up with the same truncated name in the table of
contents, however, and replacing, extracting or deleting one of them can be
tricky.  We feel this is better than the alternatives of not allowing similar
filenames to coexist, or having a non-portable format.

--------------
Marc Sabatella (marc@hpmonk.fc.hp.com)
Disclaimers:
	2 + 2 = 3, for suitably small values of 2
	Bill and Dave may not always agree with me