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Comment by nikeee | Hacker News Reader

I heard about someone circumventing disk quota by encoding the data in the file names, having only empty files.

Could be a different story, but I have this vague recollection of someone who, by taking advantage of sloppy wording, won a bet against someone else who said he couldn't compress random data.

This was a long time ago, maybe as long as twenty years ago. I'd love to find it again, though.

Do you mean this - [1]? Yes, this was pretty cool! I esp liked how Mike, the person initiating the bet, initially was super-confident he'd win:

It would be very easy to point out to him the impossibility of his task, but far more interesting to see how long he will struggle with the problem before realizing it for himself.

[1] http://www.patrickcraig.co.uk/other/compression.php

Yes, that's it. Thanks, and thanks too to pianom4n.

And, yeah, Mike ought to have paid.

Sounds like this one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9163782

Neat! Do filesystems not have a limit on maximum name length?

Yeah, they do, usually around 2^8 to 2^15 characters total. Assuming < 256 chars is usually safe, but check the docs for your OS + filesystem combo.

Most filesystems have a limit on the filename of one element, but many don't have a limit on the depth of directories or the total length of the full path to the file. Some operating systems do have a limit on the length of a fully qualified file name, but you may be able to avoid that by only using relative names.

Windows routinely shows me error if I try to rename/delete/move a file, whose name is within the limit, but the complete path from root including all the folders make it above the limit.

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