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As a lazy user, I often copy paste the document title as the filename. Windows generously trims any disallowed character, but if it didn't, lots of my files would contain colons.

I actually wish colons were supported, since it's so prevalent in document titles. Question marks, too, while at it.

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I think I read somewhere that Microsoft were investigating ways in which to get rid of the FAT32 backward compatibility issues with NTFS like the 255 character path element limit and the character limits in filenames. You can manage such files using the NTFS way of addressing them, "\\?\C:\Example\file:with?illegalstuff"

Is there an official name for those kinds of long paths in a single namespace? I found UNC, but it seems to apply only to the network variety.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_(computing)#Uniform_Namin...

I'm not sure Microsoft gives an official name for "\\?\".

The closest I can find is "To specify an extended-length path, use the "\\?\" prefix." (from https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...).

So maybe it is the "extended-length path prefix".

You can also use that prefix to access volumes that have no mount point, as in \\?\Volume{<UUID>}, among other things like UNC paths (\\?\UNC\...). So that's not a good name.

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