Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!rochester!cornell!batcomputer!itsgw!steinmetz!vdsvax!barnett
From: barnett@vdsvax.steinmetz.ge.com (Bruce G. Barnett)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: SVR3.0 vs BSD4.3
Message-ID: <4109@vdsvax.steinmetz.ge.com>
Date: 22 Mar 88 11:53:09 GMT
References: <12414@brl-adm.ARPA> <4361@megaron.arizona.edu> <7499@brl-smoke.ARPA> <20768@bu-cs.BU.EDU> <10025@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP>
Reply-To: barnett@steinmetz.ge.com (Bruce G. Barnett)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 32

In article <10025@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP> davidsen@crdos1.UUCP
	 (bill davidsen) writes:
|
| I must confess I think BSD names are
|too much of a good thing... do we really need names longer than the data
|in the file? Most sites trim the filenames to either 1k or something
|smaller, and I doubt that 1% of a ll files in the world have names
|longer than some reasonable size, such as 64 or even 32 characters.

The software I use to archive USENET articles would be completely
unmanageable if limited to 14 character names. Each file is stored
under the message ID. If I had to truncate the filenames, then I would
have several articles trying to occuply the same name.

Any suggestions to hash the message ID into some 14 character encoding
will be cheerfully met with a flame thrower. :-)

I also use filenames as keywords. For instance, I have an archive of
accounting reports, where the filename is of the format

	<machine>-<report>.<Month>_date-<AMorPM>

I use the shell characters as a first level grep, allowing constructs
like
	grep pattern *patterna*patternb*


I also don't have to worry about creating backup files by adding
a ".orig" to the original filename. 
-- 
	Bruce G. Barnett 	<barnett@ge-crd.ARPA> <barnett@steinmetz.UUCP>
				uunet!steinmetz!barnett