I am a youtuber-linuxoid. I need to group videos in a directory by date(name) and list of what seen on a videos at that date(1-3 Kilobytes). Also torrent client cutting names needed in Linux because of limit of filenames.
Ext4 (and Btrfs and XFS too) supports file names up to 255 bytes long. How long do you need a file name to be? That 1-3 KB refers to....a list of files, or the actual file name length? I'm interested in the actual use cases for this. Also, what's that name of the torrent client that magically truncates file names here? $ mkdir -p $(perl -e 'print "a"x255')/$(perl -e 'print "b"x255') $ touch $(perl -e 'print "a"x255')/$(perl -e 'print "b"x255')/$(perl -e 'print "c"x255') $ find a* aaaaaaaaaaaaa[...] well, you get the idea :-)
Directory name is a story of a filming day of 1-3KB length, video file name is a story in a video with a length also 1-3KB. I read them "diagonally" and it is a digest as a tweet but bigger. https://yandex.ru/search/?text=linux+torrent+client+cutting+long+torrent+file+names&lr=10828&clid=2583699&win=567 https://askubuntu.com/questions/181730/how-to-download-torrents-with-long-filenames
"video file name is a story"...interesting setup :-) But as you already found in your Askubuntu forum: "The problem is the common Linux file systems only support up to 255 characters filename lengths". This is explained in more detail in the following SE answers: > To what extent does Linux support file names longer than 255 bytes? > https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/619646 > Is there a reasonble way to increase the file name limitation of 255 bytes? > https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/619492 So, this would not be a feature request of Ext4 (or any other Linux file system) but of the Linux VFS, but I don't think that will be easliy implemented in the near future. Your best bet would be to change your workflow and use shorter file names.
The problem with "long filename is a description of the video" is that 1-3KiB today may grow to 4KiB or 16KiB in the future, so fixing the filename length to allow 1KiB or 3KiB names (out of a full 4KiB PATH_MAX) is only a short term solution. Changing ext4 or XFS to support 3KiB or 4KiB *filenames* would be a lot of effort for very marginal benefit. I think the right solution is to put the "full description" into a separate xattr on the file (which can be up to 64KiB in modern ext4) and then restrict filenames to 255 bytes. That allows very long descriptions without impacting interoperability.
This is impossible because it will break countless programs and POSIX compatibility.