Joliet (file system)
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Joliet is the name of an extension to the ISO 9660 file system. It has been specified and endorsed by Microsoft and has been supported by all versions of its Windows OS since Windows 95 and Windows NT[citation needed]. Its primary focus is the relaxation of the filename restrictions inherent with full ISO 9660 compliance.
Joliet accomplishes this by supplying an additional set of filenames to be encoded in UCS-2. These filenames are stored in a special supplementary header that is safely ignored by ISO 9660-compliant software, thus preserving backward compatibility.[citation needed]
The specification only allows filenames to be up to 64 Unicode characters in length. However, filenames up to 103 characters in length do not appear to cause any problems.[1]
Many current PC operating systems—including Microsoft Windows, [2] Linux,[3] Mac OS X[citation needed], FreeBSD,[4] and OpenSolaris[5]—are able to read Joliet-formatted media, thus allowing exchange of files between those operating systems even if non-Roman characters are involved (such as Arabic, Japanese or Cyrillic), which was formerly not possible with plain ISO 9660-formatted media.
The Joliet extension is favored in the MS Windows world.[citation needed] It allows Unicode characters to be used for all text fields, which includes file names and the volume name. A "Secondary" volume descriptor with type 2 contains the same information as the Primary one (sector 16 offset 40 bytes), but in UCS-2 in sector 17, offset 40 bytes. As a result of this, the volume name is limited to 16 characters.
The 'disktype' program prints the Unicode volume name from the Joliet volume descriptor if present.[6]
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