Hi, Richard Owlett wrote: > > /home/richard/.local/share/Trash/expunged/1449727740/ > └── grub2 problem-2018-02-13 > ... > Goes on for 161 directories
The name is 24 bytes long. Plus one slash yields 25. 161 times 25 = 4025 bytes for the problem directories. Plus 53 for "/home/...40/" = 4078. So far your system accepted the path. But plus 37 for "/media/richard/...sda14" yields 4115 and caused protest. Google finds me https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/include/uapi/linux/limits.h saying #define PATH_MAX 4096 /* # chars in a path name including nul */ My local /usr/include/linux/limits.h says the same. So Linux publishes a limit of at most 4095 bytes for paths. Many filesystem will actually have this limit or lower ones. It is not clear whether you bonked against a fixed limit of Linux or a specific limit of the particular filesystem on the USB disk. The origin of this insane directory chain is obscure, of course. Maybe the name parts "grub2" and "2018-02-13" help Richard to remember what might have happened back then. For the purpose of disk sanity (and maybe successful "cp -ax") i'd then consider to remove these directories. Congrats: David Wright made the better initial guess, compared to mine. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- > I suspect some of my confusion revolves around not understanding "2>&1". That's about - "standard output" (result channel of classical Unix programs - "standard error" (non-result message channel) - "redirection" (plugging together such channels) - "file descriptors" (a programmer's thing, actually) which get set at program start to: 0 = standard input (the channel for input text, normally your keyboard) 1 = standard output (normally your terminal) 2 = standard error (normally your terminal, too) All together "2>&1" funnels the non-result messages of a program into the result channel. This is done typically before a pipe that consumes standard output program 2>&1 | other_program or _after_ a redirection of standard output to a file program >log_file 2>&1 In both cases it shall join both output channels into a single channel. (If you write "program 2>&1 >log_file" the non-result messages will appear on the former standard output and the results will go into the file "log_file". Sequence matters.) Have a nice day :) Thomas
