Volume, directory, and file names

Volume identifiers can be a maximum of 30 characters and must contain only alphabetic characters (A through Z), numeric characters (0 through 9), a hyphen (-), or a period (.). The first character must be alphabetic or numeric, and the identifier cannot contain embedded blanks.

Although not required, you can include one or more directories in the path name. Each element of the path can be a maximum of 254 characters with a total maximum path length of 256 characters. A path name can consist of any of the EBCDIC characters except x00-x3F, xFF, quotation marks ("), asterick (*), less than (<), greater than (>), question mark (?), and backward slash (\).

The system stores all alphabetic characters for directory and file names to the media in uppercase when created through HFS or the IBM® i save interfaces. The system stores all alphabetic characters for directory and file names to the media in mixed case when created through the integrated file system interfaces. File name searches are not case sensitive, meaning that you can use either uppercase or lowercase characters to access existing files.

File searches on Universal Disk Format (UDF) volumes created by IBM i are not case sensitive. For UDF media created or updated by another operating system platform, a case sensitive search is performed. If no case sensitive match is found, a match that is not case sensitive is returned if it exists. If multiple matches exist on the UDF volume that are not case sensitive, an error is returned indicating that ambiguous names exist on the media. Some optical commands, such as Copy Optical (CPYOPT), are not supported when duplicate, ambiguous file names exist. For example, a UDF that is created on another operating system might allow files ABC.ext and abc.EXT to exist in the same directory. This is not supported by the CPYOPT command and might produce unpredictable results.