Jack

The thing that I find interesting is that there exists a second series of
Microsoft APIs that remove this limitation from file accesses.

From MSDN
   Windows NT: You can use paths longer than MAX_PATH
        characters by calling the wide (W) version of CreateFile and
        prepending "\\?\" to the path. The "\\?\" tells the function to turn off
    path
        parsing. This lets you use paths that are nearly 32,000 Unicode
        characters long. However, each component in the path cannot be more
        than MAX_PATH characters long. You must use fully-qualified paths
        with this technique. This also works with UNC names. The "\\?\" is
        ignored as part of the path. For example, "\\?\C:\myworld\private" is
   seen
        as "C:\myworld\private", and "\\?\UNC\tom_1\hotstuff\coolapps" is seen
        as "\\tom_1\hotstuff\coolapps".

If only IBM would make this change!

Peter





From: Jack Revette <jack.revette AT DOWCORNING DOT COM> on 05/19/99 12:55 PM GMT

Please respond to "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU>

To:   ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
cc:    (bcc: ADSM)
Subject:  NT long file names




I have a current problem (87425) open with IBM where NT 3.51 ADSM 3.1 0.6
client was doing a selective backup to an AIX 4.3 ADSM 3.1.2.20 server and
after 15+ hrs and 39GB of data encountered a fully qualified dataset name of
length 270 and dropped an informative message (ANx4005E) on both client and
server log. Ten minutes later the client aborts.  IBM's response is that
it's not an ADSM problem as Microsoft doesn't support file names greater
than 256 and points me to a microsoft doc (search on the MS site for 'Path
Too Long Error Message When Exceeding MAX_PATH ').  This doc does support
IBM's position re lfn, but also notes that NTBackup has no problem with such
files.
Last June in this forum, Andy Riebeck indicated similar concerns with NT
file names and pointed out certain limits (_MAX_DIR = 256, _MAX_EXT= 256,
_MAX_FNAME = 256, _MAX_PATH =260).
I can understand ADSM not processing 'errant' files, but I can't accept ADSM
abending or aborting backups when such a filename is encountered.  And in
general, IBM seems to agree with this position (note fixes IC20506,
IC18235).
Some questions:  Is anyone aware of attempts to remove the restriction of
the fully qualified dataset name being no greater in length than 256 or 260?
If no, is there any way to prevent users from creating such datasets?

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