Long file names -- truncated?

Antony Stone Antony at SOFT-SOLUTIONS.CO.UK
Sat Sep 13 10:05:54 IST 2003


On Saturday 13 September 2003 9:22 am, Kevin Spicer wrote:

> On Sat, 2003-09-13 at 03:25, Julian Field wrote:

> > The real original filename might be useful to a
> > site admin, I know I would be annoyed if there was *no* way of getting
> > at the original real name.
>
> Yes, but very long strings of text shouldn't be included in syslog
> messages, because a syslog packet (not just the message text) should be
> less than 1024 bytes (RFC3164 section 4.0).

I agree with both of these points, however I can't really think of a reason
why the sysadmin should need to see the filename unless they are quarantining
emails (if you no longer have the file, no need to know what it's called, I
think), and if they are quarantining (or archiving) then just the first N
characters of the filename (where N could even be as much as 50) should be
enough to figure out which file it is in the quarantine directory.

It's hard to think of a legitimate reason for files to have excessively long
names (I think the default MS limit of 150 is more than enough), so if you
come across one of these, there's almost certainly something silly going on
anyway, and you probably want to block the file.

If your local policy is not to quarantine, then you no longer really need to
know the full name; if your local policy is to quarantine, you can find the
file by using the first few characters of the name.

Just my 2p.

Antony.

--

If at first you don't succeed, destroy all the evidence that you tried.



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