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From: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Long filenames (was: What kinds of things would you want in the GNU OS?)
Keywords: OS filenames
Message-ID: <4439@ficc.uu.net>
Date: 7 Jun 89 16:53:30 GMT
References: <106326@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <4315@ficc.uu.net> <338@arc.UUCP> <629@crdgw1.crd.ge.com>
Organization: Xenix Support
Lines: 60

In article <629@crdgw1.crd.ge.com>, barnett@crdgw1.crd.ge.com (Bruce G. Barnett) writes:
> In article <9422@alice.UUCP>, andrew@alice (Andrew Hume) writes:
> Example:
> 	If I wanted to print out all weekly sa -in and sa -im reports
> for machines vaxA and SunB that ocurred in January, I could type:

> My Method:
> 	print {vaxA,sunB}*sa-i[nm]*Jan*WEEK

> Your method:
> 	print `awk '$2 ~ /vaxA|sunB/ && $3 == "sa" && $4 ~/i[nm]/ && \
> 		$5 ~ /Jan.*WEEK/  {print $1}' data `

My method:
	print {vaxA,sunB}/sa/i[nm]/Jan/*WEEK

Disadvantages with your method:

	You need lots of long file names.

	'ls -C' is useless.

	'ls' takes forever.

> If I had to re-implement my report scheme on a system with filenames
> less than 14 characters, it would have taken me twice as long to do it.

Not at all. It would take you no longer... hierarchical directories are
a wonderful tool.

14 characters is getting a little cramped, but I've never run out of 30.

> Another example is the large USENET archive I keep.
> First of all, I store old articles using the format
> 	./news.group/yy-mm/article-id

Why not /news/group/...?

> There is a one-line summary of the subject line in the file
> 	./LOGS/news.group

./LOGS/news/group...

> There are so many advantages to this scheme. Articles are always a known
> depth from the top (comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d vs. comp/binaries/ibm/pc/d).

The only problem with this is that UNIX wildcards don't support ellipses.
One of the very few VMS features I genuinely miss... and a much more useful
tool than superlongfilenames. But surely you don't find "find" to be THAT
hard to use.

> [14 characters] would have make the task more difficult, more complex, more
> inflexible and more inefficient.

Not at all.
-- 
Peter da Silva, Xenix Support, Ferranti International Controls Corporation.

Business: uunet.uu.net!ficc!peter, peter@ficc.uu.net, +1 713 274 5180.
Personal: ...!texbell!sugar!peter, peter@sugar.hackercorp.com.