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Most clients that access the PowerScale clusters are systems running Windows, Linux, or macOS, and communicating through the SMB or NFS protocols. In general, the filename and path limitations for each of these operating systems are as follows:
Operating system | Filename and path limits |
Linux | 255 bytes, path length varies. |
Windows | Windows 8 and later—32,000~ for path, and 256 characters for each file or path component*. |
macOS | 255 characters, or as restricted by protocol. |
Note. * Win32 Explorer limitations: Various Windows APIs remain limited to 260 characters (not bytes). Microsoft circumvented this limitation in NTFS by using a short-name format. Also referred to as 8.3, this short-name format reduces a long name to a maximum length of eight characters and up to a three-character extension.
This limitation can be mitigated to a large extent in Windows 10 by editing the Windows registry key HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\LongPathsEnabled to value 1. However, this change might not help Explorer or other components using older versions of the API.
Another interesting facet of Windows paths is that NT based paths have always supported 32 K characters if the path starts with \\?\. However, this path has to be absolute, not relative, because the Win32 API passes it directly to the kernel.