Copying long file names in OS X

[drewangst]

I ran in to an interesting problem last night when I tried to copy a bunch of files from cd to my hard drive. The cd was burned under windows, basically I backup up all my mp3s to cd so I could copy them to my new mac. I got errors when I tried to drag files with very long file names to the hard drive. When I opened the terminal and copied the files that way it worked fine.

Has anyone else seen similar problems in with the finder? Is there some limit with it that I just don't know about?


Andrew

 

[rharder]

I had intermitten problems like this when I used open, multisession cd's. Sometimes it worked. Somtimes not.

-Rob

 

[drewangst]

I was talking with another guy over lunch and we came to the conclusion that since finder is, from what I hear, a carbon app that it only supports approx 32 character filenames, like older versions of mac os. (os X is my first experience with macs so I can't verify this) The reason the terminal doesn't have problems with long filenames because it's a port of a unix app which supports 256 character names.
Can anyone verify this? If so, does anyone know if the finder will support 256 character filenames as some point?


Andrew

 

[rharder]

I use >32 file names now in the Finder, and my understanding from Apple docs is that even OS 9 on HFS+ <em>could</em> support it but doesn't.

-Rob

 

[Elder Dan]

I assume the target hard drive was HFS+, not HFS Standard? If it was Standard, that's why it failed.