Causes of shortened Vista system folder names

Causes of shortened Vista system folder names

Vista made great changes to the folder structure. My first impression was that it became more like a Unix layout. Microsoft finally decided to shorten the folder name, remove spaces in the middle of the name, and use partial acronyms.

C:/Documents and Settings are changed to C:/users.
Change my documents to documents
Change Application Data to appdata/roaming.
Change local settings to appdata/local
Change all users/Application Data to C:/programdata
......

The path has finally been restored. Unfortunately, the program files has not been changed. Microsoft insisted that programs and program files have different meanings. However, the reason for renaming is not because people think that the original name is not good, but for compatibility.

The person who has written the C program should remember the max_path constant, whose value is 260. A large number of windows APIs, shells, and applications are limited by this value. The file system has long supported a long path, but this c constant has never been changed to maintain compatibility. People who have read the Documents and Settings folder know that the folder names are abnormal and long, And the folder nesting level is very deep. It is easy to exceed 260, and now it is more and more prone to the path too long error. Some Unicode APIs provide support for long paths //? /Prefix), but few people know, because such support is more like a detour: does not support relative paths, does not support path format check and regularization, the worst thing is that files created in this way cannot be accessed by functions such as loadlibrary, or even in explorer. In this way, renaming Documents and Settings becomes the most practical method.