Re: Shorten windows paths too long

[Marshall]

The limit on paths with NTFS is 255 chars that is a hard limit and there is no tricky OS setting to change that of which I am aware. One thing that you could try is making a mount point further down the directory tree. That should allow you to get to a file with huge absolute pathname using a shorter pathname which uses this "fake" drive letter. NTFS mount points As they say, "some assembly" required... There are only 26 drive letters possible: A-Z so this is not nearly as flexible as a unix mount point.

I suppose that you could make some sort of "movelong" command that copies the file twice. CD down into the tree to target, then copy file from current directory to some path like C:/temp, then traverse tree to reach new directory and copy from C:/temp to current directory?

Update: NTFS maintains a "short" filename for backward compatibility (unless that feature is turned off on your system). how Windows generates short filenames. To see what these are do a "dir /x". There should be some way to assemble enough of these short names together to create a path that fits within 255 chars with target file being a "long name".

I hadn't counted characters in your path. I just assumed that you were right about the 255, but your path does indeed appear to be short enough as per tye's post. If any file in the path is open, even for read, windows won't let you rename the path, but you should get an error message.

[afoken]

There is a way to work around with paths longer than 260 chars: http://www.foken.de/alexander/projekte/windows/deepcopy.html#Algorithm.

Alexander

[gj2666]

Thank you for the suggestion, it looks like something that would do the trick. I will likely have to give blood before they'll allow me to download it unfortunately.

Governments are fussy that way.