VSS Naming Syntax, Conventions and Limitations

VSS has the following naming syntax, conventions and limitations:

• User names and label names can be up to 31 characters long.
  
  
• User passwords can be up to 15 characters long.
  
  
• Filenames can be up to 255 characters long.  Filenames can include spaces on operating systems that support them.
  
  
• Project paths can be up to 259 characters long (including the filename).
  
  
• Project or file labels can be up to 31 characters long.
  
  
• Search strings can be up to 63 characters long.
  
  
• Comments can be up to 63 characters long for the check out command, and 4K characters long for other comments.
  
  
• Lines in the VSS initialization files can be up to 511 characters long.
  
  
• Files and projects (added together) in the VSS database can total no more than 4 billion.
  
  
• Files and projects (added together) in any project of the VSS database can total no more than 8191.
  
  
• The size of a file stored in the VSS database is limited to 2 gigabytes.
  
  
• The number of versions of a given file that VSS can store is limited to 32,767.

Most names in VSS cannot begin or end with spaces or tabs.  Any character can be used for names or labels, except the following:

• Dollar sign ($)
  
  
• At sign (@)
  
  
• Angle brackets (< >), brackets ([ ]), braces ({ }), and parentheses (( ))
  
  
• Colon (:) and semicolon (;)
  
  
• Equal sign (=)
  
  
• Caret sign (^)
  
  
• Pipe (vertical bar) (|)
  
  
• Asterisk (*)
  
  
• Exclamation point (!)
  
  
• Forward (/) and backward slash (\)
  
  
• Percent sign (%)
  
  
• Question mark (?)
  
  
• Comma (,)
  
  
• Quotation mark (single or double) (' ")
  
  
• Tab

VSS supports Universal Naming Convention (UNC) filenames.  If your network operating system supports UNC pathnames, you can use them anywhere you specify a path name.

VSS does not support the use of @ characters on Banyan Vines networks.  Banyan Vines users can access all VSS functionality by using mapped network drive letters.