I have been using Samba on my Linux machine as a great way to provide a bunch of extra directory space for backing up my various Windows computers.

It can be a real pain, though, to back up files with extremely long filenames. This happens mainly with saved websites, weblinks, or with music files - where the filenames are extraordinarily long.

I'm not using any type of backup software (that would be some future project). For now, when I'm on my Windows computer - I just open one of the Samba drives and copy everything into it.

The problem comes when it gets to one of these really really long names and then it stops the copying wherever it was and pops up a message saying that the filename was too long. When I rename the file (to something shorter) then I can copy it to my Linux box with no problems. However, this interrupts the whole copying process, and it has become impossible to start this and then go to bed and wake up with all my files copied.

Perhaps this should have been put into the "non-Unix" category, but what I'm really looking for is a Windows program that can scan my hard drive and alert me if any filenames are too long for Linux. Then I can fix them before kicking off a copy that will take a while.

Better even still, of course, would be if the Linux filesystem would just allow longer filenames!!! Then we wouldn't have this problem in the first place!!