Windows long path experimenting report

[Bill Barry]

I'd assume that means you are using XP. XP appears to have some special 
casing built in to explorer to handle deleting long file names.
Win 2000 would let you create really long filenames in explorer, but 
once you created one long enough, you couldn't do anything with it:
can't open the directory (viewing in an explorer window causes the 
window to hang for a while and then come up with an alert message)
can't rename the directory
can't delete the directory

In XP you still couldn't open directories that were long enough, but you 
could rename them and delete them (at least this was my experience).

An alternative route that you could potentially try would be to create 
junctions instead of directories for the long names (I don't know how 
far this would get you though as I haven't experimented with it).
Ie.
create really long directory name
create really short directory name with name being some deterministic 
function of the long dir name
convert the long directory into a junction to the short directory
work inside the short directory (paths that go through the long 
directory are transparently converted to the short directory by the OS)


Adrian Buehlmann wrote:
> Amazing.
>
> I just found out that I actually *can* delete my clone of http://www.cadifra.com/cgi-bin/repos/long1/
> by using explorer.
>
> But not by using command line.
>