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I'm pretty sure Unix even in its most primitive forms never had a 5-character filename limit. It might have been 8 initially, but not less than that.
by cpr 17y ago
I'm pretty sure Unix even in its most primitive forms never had a 5-character filename limit. It might have been 8 initially, but not less than that.
- allenbrunson 17y agoyeah, i admit, i'm kind of reaching. i am sure i read a story about where the original limitation came from, i just can't remember the details. maybe it had something to do with kernel functions versus library functions? creat(), read(), write(), etc were all part of the early unix kernel, and were accessed via call gate or syscall or something, whereas printf() and friends were part of a library, and didn't require a trip into kernel-land, and therefore weren't under the same restrictions. something like that.