It uses variable length directory entries. The maximal file name size is 255 characters. This limit could be extended to 1012 if needed. This allows the administrator to recover easily from situations where user processes fill up filesystems. In addition to the standard Unix features, Ext2fs supports some extensions which are not usually present in Unix filesystems.
File attributes allow the users to modify the kernel behavior when acting on a set of files.
One can set attributes on a file or on a directory. In the later case, new files created in the directory inherit these attributes. BSD or System V Release 4 semantics can be selected at mount time. A mount option allows the administrator to choose the file creation semantics. On a filesystem mounted with BSD semantics, files are created with the same group id as their parent directory.