The "32" suffix was added to the name because I limited the size of the buffer to 32 (because I didn't need more than that and I'm not sure what the underlying limits are but also didn't want to dynamically allocate memory unnecessarily). I agree that is confusing if the other functions with numbers appended are referring to 64-bit versions of the functions. Do you think we should just drop the "32" but keep the arbitrary limit on the buffer size?  Perhaps increase it to 256 or 1024? 

I could write an OS X version of this -- I do have a Macbook Pro although I haven't tried installing cvmfs on it.  Although this function is currently only used by the overlayfs code which as far as I know would only be useful on the repository stratum 0 host, and I didn't think Mac OS X could be used for that...