Dataset Naming Convention

TrueNAS General
1

New to TrueNAS and currently running Dragonfish-24.04.2.

When creating a dataset and assigning it a name, it appears that underscore characters are not allowed. Can someone point me to the Dataset Naming Convention? I’ve check the documentation and can’t find it.

2

Alphanumeric and following characters: -_.:, but the maximum length for a dataset name is 256 characters (note that the dataset name length includes all dataset name components – separated by / – and snapshot names count toward the total length of a dataset name). This means one should not treat datasets like directories and nest them deeply.

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3

Thanks awalkerix! Just what I was looking for.
Did you find this in the online documentation?

4

Well that’s… odd.

Why is there such a limitation with ZFS? Even a full path in a Linux filesystem can be up to 4095 characters in length.

5

Because it’s a dataset name. It’s not a path.

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6

The information you want is documented here:

7

Thanks bella! Very helpful. It appears from the doc that the only special characters allowed are dash and underscore.

8

Well, putting a semi-colon in a dataset name is terrible idea because it’s unsupported over SMB protocol (will get mangled).