Re: cant access to files more than 128 utf-8 symbol long names

[Andrey Repin <anrdaemon at yandex dot ru>]

Greetings, Corinna Vinschen!

> The problem here is about NAME_MAX.  NAME_MAX is per POSIX[1] the
> "maximum number of bytes in a filename (not including the terminating
> null)."

Does this mean that POSIX standard is not compatible with real life?
No surprise I was having hard times copying a rather simple directory
structure to a UNIX servers. Just 2 levels deep with 4-5 words in each
element name.

> Note the word *bytes*.  Not characters, bytes. UTF-8 chars are 1 to 4
> bytes in length.  Thus, the maximum number of UTF-8 chars in a filename
> is potentially less than NAME_MAX:

> A filename of chars only from the basic latin charset (1 byte in UTF-8)
> may consist of NAME_MAX characters, a filename solely constructed from
> chars of the latin-1 supplement (2 byte chars) may consist of NAME_MAX /
> 2 characters, a filename constructed from emoticons (4 byte chars) only
> of NAME_MAX / 4 chars.

> Ok, so we all know that Windows is not using a byte representation of
> filenames, rather the OS uses UTF-16 to store and handle filenames
> internally.  Filename on Windows filesystems may consist of 255 UTF-16
> chars[2].

> How do you represent this in a byte-oriented POSIX system?  What do you
> set NAME_MAX to?  You can't get it right due to the unfortunate multibyte
> vs. UTF-16 encoding issue.

> To cover all UTF-8 chars, NAME_MAX would have to be 1020.  But then,
> applications relying on NAME_MAX will be surprised by ENAMETOOLONG
> errors for perfectly valid POSIX filenames.

> If you make it 255, applications will be surprised by ENAMETOOLONG
> errors for perfectly valid Windows filenames.

> If you make it 255 on the application level but then return filenames
> longer than 255 multibyte chars to the application, they will crash
> due to buffer overflow issues.  After all, NAME_MAX is a contractual
> obligation.

> There was also the backward compatibility issue.  Back in the pre-Cygwin
> 1.7 days, when Cygwin used the ANSI file API, NAME_MAX was already 255.
> Changing that to a bigger value might have resulted in the
> aforementioned application crashes due to buffer overflows as well.

> So we decided to keep NAME_MAX at the same value as it always was, 255.
> This restricts the actual filename length when using multibyte
> characters just as on any other POSIX system with the downside that,
> occasionally, a Windows filename will be too long to handle.

> Sorry if that is frustrating in your current situation, but this
> isn't something we can just change at a whim and go ahead.  It would
> break compatibility with all existing Cygwin executables.


> Corinna


> [1] http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/limits.h.html
> [2] However, this does *not* cover NFS or other filesystems using a
>     byte representation for storing filenames.




--
WBR,
Andrey Repin (anrdaemon@yandex.ru) 11.12.2013, <10:55>

Sorry for my terrible english...


--
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple