[gs-devel] What is a reasonable value for 'gp_file_name_sizeof'

[SaGS]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ray Johnston" <Ray.Johnston at Artifex.com>
To: "tech" <tech at artifex.com>
Cc: "gs-devel" <gs-devel at ghostscript.com>
Sent: Monday, 27 August 2007 21:43
Subject: [gs-devel] What is a reasonable value for 'gp_file_name_sizeof'


> ...
>
> In looking into a support issue for a customer (#1), I noticed that
> src/gp.h has '#define gp_file_name_sizeof 260' with a comment that
> this is the maximum size for Windows.
>
> This strikes me as extremely unlikely to be the Windows limit (at
> least since Windows 98 added long file name support).
> ...

For Windows:

260 is indeed the "normal" maximum for a full path on Windows, even if it is 
very close to the maximum for the filename-proper part (256).

There are 2 #defines for the max path length: _MAX_PATH (with a leading 
underscore) in the CRTL headers and MAX_PATH (without leading underscore) in 
the Platform SDK headers. The value for both is 260.

On Win2K and later (not sure about WinNT4), but not on Win95/98/ME, it is 
possible to have full paths of max 32K-1 characters. These are supported by 
the Unicode versions of file handling routines, if the full path is prefixed 
with "\\?\". I never attempted to compile GS as a Unicode application, and I 
don't think it would work.