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From: ken@dali.gatech.edu (Ken Seefried iii)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sysv386
Subject: Re: 14 character limitation in filenames
Message-ID: <20804@hydra.gatech.EDU>
Date: 30 Jan 91 18:47:45 GMT
References: <290@sps.com> <20711@hydra.gatech.EDU> <1154@upvax.UUCP>
Sender: news@prism.gatech.EDU
Reply-To: ken@dali.gatech.edu (Ken Seefried iii)
Organization: The House Of Fun
Lines: 47

In article <1154@upvax.UUCP> stevewa@upvax.UUCP (Steve Ward) writes:
>This is somewhat off the sysv386 path, but:
>In article <20711@hydra.gatech.EDU> ken@dali.gatech.edu (Ken Seefried iii) writes:
>>Overcome in System V release 4.  It *can* be done in System V.3.2
>>(Tektronix UTek V for the 88000 has flex-names and is 3.2 based).
>
>I suspect this is because Tek used the Berkley FFS for UTek/V.  My inside
>sources tell me the OS development for the XD88 was done on Tek 4317/19
>workstations, which run "old" UTek, a Berkely 4.2 variant.  It would have
>been perfectly logical for them to adopt the Berkely FFS, and just plug
>the disks drives into the new machine for testing.

Yes.  UTek V has FFS.  Flex-names, sym-links and all.  However,
one simply doesn't drop FFS on top of System V and rock-n-roll.
Take a walk throught the System V.3.2 source some time and see
how many commands are hardwired with the assumption that
filenames are 14 chars long.

This was hashed out in some detail on (i think) comp.arch some
months ago.

>It is interesting to note that while UTek/V has the advanced file system
>in all other respects it is quite probably the most vanilla system V.3.2
>OS I've ever worked on (eg, while 'vi' is available, 'more' is not...sure
>gets difficult to remember to type 'pg' instead of 'more'...).

$ ln /bin/pg /bin/more

I've got one on my desk at work.  Bizarre machine.  Damn shame
they couldn't have been developed to maturity.

>
>>Noone has done it for the 386 that I know of.
>
>I thought ESIX had a Berkely FFS...does it have the 14 character limit?
>

So it seems.  But someone also indicated that it isn't yet fully
functional.  I rather suspect that's cause of hardwired limits in
the utilities.

Finally, in the end, we actually got back on the topic....;')

--
	ken seefried iii	"A sneer, a snarl, a whip that
	ken@dali.cc.gatech.edu	 stings...these are a few of
				 my favorite things..."