Will FreeBSD follow OpenZFS' lead and embrace longer file names?

[mer]

Yes, IMHO, sidecar files with the rest of the information or a database make far more sense. Also, depending upon the type of file there's often times the ability to search the file itself for information. Plus, there is the strings utility, so even if it is a binary format you may be able to get data from in there as well.

I think even Windows does some of this by searching and indexing everything all the time. I don't like them, but a graphical file manager, show the file as an icon, mouse hover over it and get an extended "tool tip" description.

A shell script that does a find and strings could automate 90% of it.

 

[hedwards]

I think even Windows does some of this by searching and indexing everything all the time. I don't like them, but a graphical file manager, show the file as an icon, mouse hover over it and get an extended "tool tip" description.

A shell script that does a find and strings could automate 90% of it.

I'm fairly sure that that's a large part of what the indexing service on Windows does. It's something that I often times disable because I've got large disks and it can slow things down a bunch.

There's a bunch of options, there's even tarfs. I don't think it gives you the ability to write, but if you just need read access, you can just tar up the file and its sidecar information and mount it via tarfs.

 

[bgavin]

When I’m working data recovery I don’t have the luxury of concise file naming. I work with what the user creates.

Some of the entries contain characters illegal in the Win32 environment as they come from Apple OS.

Win32 file search can find these, but Win32 cannot open, close or rename these files. If the customer drive is fortunate enough to have kept the 8.3 notation I use this to copy and rename these files file as close to the original as possible.