Gilboa Davara wrote: > To what FS are you trying to move the files to? ext3? fat/fat32? > As far as I remember, ext3 filenames are limited to 255 characters. For what it's worth (and I know it's been worked out that this isn't the problem for the Original Poster), I understand the limit to be 255 bytes. With UTF-8, a character can take up several bytes (up to four, under current Unicode standards). See man 7 utf8 for details. So for example, [james@kendrick tmp]$ touch aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa [james@kendrick tmp]$ touch ☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺ touch: cannot touch `☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺☺': File name too long The "aaa..." filename is just 86 characters, so works fine (you can tell because there's no error message). The ☺ symbol takes three bytes, so a name consisting just of ☺ can only have 85 characters (= 255 bytes). Then you have to worry about combining characters... James (who is feeling rather dirty after using *that* many smileys in one message!) -- E-mail address: james | Og just boggle how stupid spammer is. How stupid @westexe.demon.co.uk | spamhaus is. How stupid spamhaven is. Og thought | there was such thing as "evolution". How all these | stupid people still alive? Og boggle. Boggle Og. | -- Caveman Og