Most posts i read just give info about the maximum file name length's. But, i want to understand why there's this limit. Why can't file name's be big. I see that few file systems have put a limit of 255 bytes. Why not 1 MB or anything more than 255 bytes. I probably would never have a file name of length more than 100 characters. But, this question is about why the limit?
long file name costs much more space and time than you can imagine
the 255 bytes limit of file name length is a long time trade off between human
onvenience and space/time efficiency
and backward compatibility , of course
back to the dark old days , the capacity of hard drive capacity was count by MB or a few GB
file name are often stored in some fixed length C structs ,
and the size of the struct was mostly round by the factor of 512 byte,
which is the size of a physical sector ,so that it can be read out by a single touch of the head
if the file system put a limit of 1MB on filename, it would run out of harddisk space with only a few hundred files. and memory limits also applys.....