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Subject: RE: Unicode in filenames support? (FAQ update needed)
Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2005 18:20:13 -0400
Message-ID: <94BF3137C62D3E4CAED7E97F876585F09DA9B7@pauex2ku08.agere.com>
From: "Williams, Gerald S \(Jerry\)" <gsw AT agere DOT com>
To: <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
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I wrote:
>> However, it was NTFS-specific and Cygwin went a different
>> route (which has path length limitations, but I digress).

Christopher Faylor wrote:
> And, Joshua could I get a FAQ entry about this, too?  This
> has got to be at least the fifth time that someone has felt
> compelled to make the observation that the current
> implementation of managed mode has path length limitations.

Sorry, poor wording choice. To be honest, I don't even know
if managed mounts still have those limitations since I don't
use them, although that was my understanding at the time.

My approach was to use underlying NT services that bypass
normal Windows naming restrictions, allowing more or less
arbitrary Unicode strings as file names. It had path length
limitations, but they were no worse than what Windows has
already. It was my understanding that Cygwin managed mounts
did this by escaping such characters into multi-character
sequences, which of course would cause you to run into the
Windows limits sooner. There are other ways to accomplish
this, so the mechanism may have changed for all I know.

(I don't necessarily expect that there will be any interest
in my solution, but I thought that I should mention it just
in case. As I said, there are other ways to deal with this
without imposing path length limitations, and I don't even
know how much of a concern such limits are in general.)

gsw


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