Windows xp path length limit

Best Wireless iPhone Earbuds. Best Bluetooth Trackers. Best eReaders. Best VPN. Browse All News Articles. Baby Shark YouTube. Venmo Gifts. Fortnite iPhone. Quest Headset SteamVR. M1 Mac Dropbox. Windows 11 Uninstall Clock. Teams Walkie-Talkie. PCI Express 6. Use Your iPhone as a Webcam. Hide Private Photos on iPhone. All Microsoft's PowerToys for Windows. Take Screenshot by Tapping Back of iPhone. Windows 11 Default Browser. Browse All Windows Articles.

Windows 10 Annual Updates. OneDrive Windows 7 and 8. Copy and Paste Between Android and Windows. Protect Windows 10 From Internet Explorer. Mozilla Fights Double Standard. Connect to a Hidden Wi-Fi Network. Change the Size of the Touch Keyboard. Feedback will be sent to Microsoft: By pressing the submit button, your feedback will be used to improve Microsoft products and services. Privacy policy. A local path is structured in the following order: drive letter, colon, backslash, name components separated by backslashes, and a terminating null character.

For example, you may hit this limitation if you are cloning a git repo that has long file names into a folder that itself has a long name. The Windows API has many functions that also have Unicode versions to permit an extended-length path for a maximum total path length of 32, characters. This type of path is composed of components separated by backslashes, each up to the value returned in the lpMaximumComponentLength parameter of the GetVolumeInformation function this value is commonly characters.

These prefixes are not used as part of the path itself. Thus the name of a file or directory can be up to characters. If your path is longer, you will have to set your working directory along the way ugh - side effects due to the process-wide setting.

According to MSDN , it's characters. It will error out doing something like a file copy on filenames longer than that. However, a program can read and write much longer filenames which is how you get to lengths that Explorer complains about in the first place.

Microsoft's "recommended fix" in situations like this is to open the file in the original program that wrote it and rename it. Apart from that, the maximum path name length is always 32, Unicode characters, with each path component no more than characters. According to the new Windows SDK documentation 8. NTFS supports paths up to 32, Unicode characters long, with each component up to characters. Explorer -and the Windows API- limits you to characters for the path, which include drive letter, colon, separating slashes and a terminating null character.

If you read the above posts you'll see there is a 5th thing you can be certain of: Finding at least one obstinate computer user! Don't shoot the messenger! Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. Ask Question. Asked 13 years, 2 months ago. Active 2 years, 9 months ago. Viewed k times. Peter Mortensen GateKiller GateKiller I've never seen so many different answers to what ought to be a simple question.

Sure, there are qualifiers, but these can't all be right can they? You are missing something in there. I believe RobertPitt was quoting the filename limit which is what this question is about , not the path limit.

Show 4 more comments. Active Oldest Votes. Louis CAD 9, 2 2 gold badges 35 35 silver badges 53 53 bronze badges.

Adam Rosenfield Adam Rosenfield k 95 95 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. Here is some more facts that confirms this answer Windows is normally limited to characters : msdn. The total path is, for all practical purposes, limited to characters allowing for the null-terminator.