Tar - max filename length 100; why ?

[Jim Bachesta]

In article <1764 at riscy.enet.dec.com> frank at croton.enet.dec.com (Frank Wortner) writes:
>It's basically an ill-considered design decision by the original
>author(s) of tar.  The
>restriction dates back to the first version --- back in V7 days.  In any
>event, tar was
>such an improvement over its predecesor, tp, that no one really
>complained.  Tp limited
>file names to 32 characters!
>
>If you need to archive or interchange files with long (>100 character)
>names, you could
>consider GNU tar, cpio, dump, or, perhaps, a program of your own
>concoction.  You would
>lose compatibility with regular tar, but it's than not being able to
>tape those files at all.
>
>						Frank

There is a mistake in the above recommendation. The tar format is a
standard. As part of the structure of this standard, it defines a length 
of 100 characters for the file name and path. GNU tar conforms to this
standard. The advantage of GNU tar is in the user interface. It gives
the users a much larger number of options in how to chose the files to
extract or archive. If you use "cpio" the limit is 128 characters. Not
much better than the tar limit. One options is to change the structure
in GNU tar to use more characters in the name. This will of course make
you non standard. I constantly hit this same limit and would appreciate
it if someone comes up with a better solution than "non-standard"
formats. BSD dump is ok, but only for complete file systems, not
practical if you have a small file set to archive.

				Jim Bachesta
				System Manager 
				Boeing P3-Update IV project
				ARPA:bachesta at trident.boeing.com