Why do I get error that filenames longer than 31 characters are unsupported?

Thanks. That worked for me. In addition to not being able to save files with names "longer than 31 characters", I was also getting a "read only" message when I tried to create a new folder by clicking on the "New Folder" button at the bottom of the Save requester. Both these issues were resolved.

Background: trying to save a Safari webpage by using the "Save as PDF" option. 10.9.4, destination disk is the boot volume - Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

I was getting the same kind of message trying to save a Pages document. It turns out the problem was the name of the folder I was trying to save the file in. The problem was that the folder’s name began with “+”. After removing the + from the folder’s name I was able to save the Pages file in that folder.

This what happened to me.

I was trying to save a document in Pages for the first time, and got the following message:

Names longer than 31 characters are not supported on the destination volume.

I kept making the file name shorter but got the same message. I did this even though I had already saved several Pages documents with long file names saved in the same place. But had recently changed the folder name.

After shortening the file name a few more times the message that Couldn’t Auto Save pops up instead of the one about “Names longer than 31 characters…”.

I was told by Apple Tech Support that using special characters in file names &/or folder names will cause this problem. Which doesn’t make sense to me. But I proved to myself that it is true.

I was surprised to hear Apple Tech Support said special characters included "+" "-" and "_" . And the folder I was trying to save to had the “+” symbol in the folder’s name. I had saved many files in this folder previously. But recently added the “+” to the beginning of the folder name to have it displayed first in the folder list. I’m now using the number 1 instead of "+".

I would like to see a list of friendly characters that can be used in folder and file names. But I have an idea of what “special characters” may be.

Two things I did that worked for me:

1) Made sure folder and file name did not use “special characters.” And then saved my Pages document.

2) Saved my file to the desktop, then moved it to the folder.

I was told by Apple Tech Support that using special characters in file names &/or folder names will cause this problem.

Aha! So that's the problem. Didn't occur to me to ask that one.

In OS 9 and earlier, the only character you couldn't use was the colon : , since that was the path separator. Unix, which underlies OS X, uses more symbols to denote functions, so they can't be used as plain characters. Avoid these characters:

Forward slash /

Backslash \

Pipe |

Colon :

Semicolon ;

Plus +

Period . (At the beginning of any folder or file name. Elsewhere is fine).

Comma ,

Less than <

Greater than >

While some of the above are allowed in folder and file names, a particular app may still not like some of them, as you discoverd.

Wikipedia has this note:

Note 1: While they are allowed in Unix file and folder names, most Unix shells require certain characters such as spaces, <, >, |, \, and sometimes :, (, ), &, ;, #, as well as wildcards such as ? and *, to be quoted or escaped:

laisony wrote:

1) Made sure folder and file name did not use “special characters.” And then saved my Pages document.

2) Saved my file to the desktop, then moved it to the folder.

1: Like some of us already said, this happens without any funny characters present.

2: This may be a workaround but not a solution.

Kurt Lang wrote:

Avoid these characters:

Forward slash /

Backslash \

Pipe |

Colon :

Semicolon ;

Plus +

Period . (At the beginning of any folder or file name. Elsewhere is fine).

Comma ,

Less than <

Greater than >

I am sorry, but in my opinion this is not good advice. The finder tells you if you try to use a forbidden character in a file name.

I am sorry, but in my opinion this is not good advice.

Yes, in your opinion. I'm quoting Unix sources who themselves say to avoid these characters. I didn't just pull them out of a hat. In OS X's earlier days, you could not use /, | or \. If you managed to get one of those characters into a name, other apps, or even the OS would tell you it didn't exist since / and \ are path delineators, and the pipe | is a command to pass the proceeding argument to whatever command comes after it.

Apple has since made it possible to use these characters in a file name, but it's still not a good idea. I've still run into the occasional app that doesn't know what to do with a file or folder that has those characters in them. Such as foo/bar.tif It thinks you have a file named bar.tif in a folder named foo, which it can't find because the folder of course doesn't exist.

Hi! I had this problem a while ago and posted. Since then no problem until today. I wanted to save a pdf I was printing from a webpage. The name was longer than 31 characters and had << and >> in it. So I took out the special characters first, although they have never caused a problem before (I am running on Mavericks 10.9.2 and Firefox.). It still wouldn't save, so I shortened the name to less than 31 characters, all alphabetic or blank, still wouldn't save. There was a .pdf on the end of the name, so I took that off and it started to save, then told me it couldn't save the document with that name. In my original save attempts, I saved to a file on the desktop, but I had to change the destination folder to use it; so today I decided to use the original (unacceptable) name with the special characters and save it to the destination recommended -- it worked. I have decided this is not a problem with special characters or file name length at all, but a problem with the destination folder identification. The first time this happened it wouldn't let me save to the alias of the folder it finally saved to. I would really like Apple to figure this out; I'm betting it's a fairly straightforward fix. BTW I am saving to the hard drive on my iMac, plenty of space, no other tweeks made.

Oregon Ducky

Moving or in my case renaming "com.apple.finder.plist" did the trick. Just FYI to others...It's clear to me this is a Mavericks bug. I had permission issues that disk warrior could not fix (Mac Mini 2010), so I cleared the HDD and installed a back to installation disk (10.4) and upgraded. Problem surfaced for first time on file name that is identical in terms of length and characters, but would not save.

thanks again OD. JW

I have a new MacBook Pro 15” retina 2 GHz Intel Core i7, 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3, Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB. I am using Pages and exporting a 400 KB file (small) to PDF. This has not caused any trouble before today, but after a rearrangement of the directories the export function no longer works. I get the message:

Names longer than 31 characters are not supported on the destination volume.

If I select a shorter name, no file is exported.

Rebooting the system did not help.

Repairing disk permissions did not help.

Renaming the destination folder did not help.

Changing permissions of ‘staff’ to read and write using sudo on terminal worked, and the file was exported.

This is very strange and not acceptable, as I was logged in as the administrator, not a member of staff. Apple fixers, please take note. Fix this bug.

I, too, have been experiencing this 'Names longer than 31 characters are not supported on the destination volume' for several months now. Many PDF attachments to my incoming emails have this error message now when I used to be able to without any issue. Even when I shorten the name and it appears to accept it, it is not into the designation volume (internal Mac HD). I'm currently on Maverick 10.9.5 and Mail 7.3.

My work-around is to Within the email app, do a Quick Look at the attachment(s). I select the wanted attachment and then Open in Adobe Reader the file. Once open, I Save the file to my (internal Mac HD) destination volume and it takes the full character set.

This jus solved the problem for me! I got the error earlier in the day in Mail for the first time while trying to save an email with an .rtf extension to a regular folder on my recent model Mac Mini under Mavericks. Never had the problem before. The fix is just like floyd42 mentioned. In the "save window" dialog where you are getting the error message just go over to the little bar with tiny triangle (not sure what to call it - floyd42 has it as "save requestor") and then start again at the top of your "file tree" and navigate down through it section-by-section, folder-by-folder until you again reach the destination you want, hit return, and that should be it. Apparently it just resets the path the computer is taking to the final folder or wherever you are saving the item.

I have had this problem for the first time under 10.10 Yosemite (despite never having had it before) on a Macbook air mid 2013 13".

Primary (31 character) problem arose attempting to save a Word attachment from Mail. Was associated with the other problem mentioned of being unable to create a new folder from the save dialogue, claiming the volume was not writable.

The floyd42 approach (navigating from the left panel in the save dialogue) worked for me (though not before rebooting failed to sort the problem).

Just for statistics: I've had exactly the same problem under 10.10 Yosemite: I tried to save a .doc attachment from Mail to a sub-folder in my Documents, and it failed with the "31 character" problem. Saving to the Documents folder itself worked well.

I've just had the same error. It's a brand new MacBook Pro, literally a week since I took it out of the plastic wrapping. It was delivered with Yosemite on it, and I've just upgraded from 10.10 to 10.10.1.

I was using Apple Pages, and after I'd saved the document, I tried to export a PDF copy. I'd done the same thing 10 minutes earlier without a problem, but this time I got the error "Names longer than 31 characters are not supported on the destination volume."

The destination volume in question is the MacBook Pro's internal SSD that it was delivered with.

This "solution" just worked for me:

— with my document open in Pages, I choose File —> Export To —> PDF... and tried to save it as ~/Documents/some/path/Poster for Christmas Fair 2014 but got this stupid error message about filenames over 31 characters not being supported

— doing everything exactly the same, but saving it in ~/Documents instead — it worked fine. I then just moved it with Finder to where I wanted it.

And just to recap, this is a one-week-old MacBook Pro with all the latest updates of OS X Yosemite, of Pages, and everything else, with no extra hardware.