Admins: what's the longest path your users have generated?

[PliotronX]

You may or may not be familiar with a Windows API limitation, but it sure makes administration of some files difficult for backup, restoration, viewing or editing. To this day, Windows Explorer cannot handle path names longer than 255 characters (248 w/null?). When users have the paths mapped further down than the drive letter, it allows them to make our lives more difficult.

So I was wondering, what is the longest path you guys have seen? This one network that has been problematic (read: ID10T error) sits at 342 characters and it literally has "Items that won't copy into folders" as one of its subfolders.

 

[cbrunny]

We have that problem in our area but I think it has something to do with the network drive mapping. I'm not an admin - im a user that has hit this issue. As it was explained to me, there are more letters in the network mapping than what are actually shown that count somewhere. PITA!

 

[John Connor]

I was using an extension for my phpBB forum that had a file path a mile long and caused all kinds of problems. I can't remember off hand how I found the problem that was due to this long path name. Could have been using Winmerge to see what file changes occurred so I can diagnose what may have went wrong in my FTP directory. So through that process I think that's how I discovered this long path name. Got rid of that crap right quick. If I remember, it caused the compression of the files to fail as well using 7Zip.

 

[Mushkins]

Funny this came up. I had someone just the other day who saved a Chrome favorite to their desktop, but it was for a secure login page with a session cookie embedded in the URL so it was like 400 characters long.

Their user profile was completely corrupted because of it, I had to boot in safe mode, log in as a local admin, and forcibly rename it before I could even delete it to recover the profile.

 

[Carson Dyle]

I run into path length problems all the time with torrent files that I just copy as-is to temporary folders for sorting later. Is the restriction only in Windows Explorer (which is how I copy them) or within the file system?

 

[Mushkins]

I run into path length problems all the time with torrent files that I just copy as-is to temporary folders for sorting later. Is the restriction only in Windows Explorer (which is how I copy them) or within the file system?

Windows Explorer. As far as I remember, it's still there because it *was* a hard limit in older filesystems that Windows still holds backwards compatibility with. The character limit for NTFS is something like 32,000.

 

[lxskllr]

When I came back to work, they had some ridiculous file paths to get to my needed data directory. There had been a server failure, and the manual recovery left recursive backups stored inside each other. I'd get lost trying to find a file. No errors, but I'm sure it was pushing the path limit. I got that nonsense sorted out, but the server's still a disorganized mess. Nobody knows what anything is, so I can't clean it. I got my stuff straight anyway.

 

[JimmiG]

Not sure what the longest one is, but I've run into this issue many times at work. Usually it's end-users calling and saying the can't open/delete or do anything with a file.

Pretty archaic limitation. My system has 16 GB of RAM, it should be able to handle paths longer than 255 characters.

 

[Mushkins]

Not sure what the longest one is, but I've run into this issue many times at work. Usually it's end-users calling and saying the can't open/delete or do anything with a file.

Pretty archaic limitation. My system has 16 GB of RAM, it should be able to handle paths longer than 255 characters.

The problem is that Windows still supports FAT32, because a lot of external drives and legacy systems use FAT32, so that 255 character limit is imposed to maintain compatibility.

I just wish they'd make it so a filename/pathname that long just threw a "This is not compatible with FAT32, please consider changing it" warning on any system formatted with a modern filesystem instead of making the whole OS throw a hissy fit. Maybe someday.

 

[Yayo3p]

Had this happen to me. It actually triggered our Crypto Locker and all we did is shorten the charters for the folders and subfolders from the path the user had.