The original Unix filesystem had a limitation of 14 characters. Other versions of Unix used different filesystems with much larger limitations. A very few people actually liked that 14 character limit. To accommodate them, some versions of Unix allow you to force this limit artificially. For example, HP-UX allows a -S flag when creating a UFS filesystem. And they have a convertfs command to take a one-way trip into longer filenames. Other versions of Unix may have something like that too. But if your version of Unix is still using the old filesystem, you probably have no way around it except to upgrade to a more modern version of Unix.