Created a file that I can't delete

Post #172,849 by bluke 9/6/04 11:44:37 AM Reply	Created a file that I can't delete I have a very deep directory hierarchy for our java code and we have some long classnames and classes that have inner classes with long names. Anyway, after running a build, I found that I could not delete the classes. There was 1 file that Windows couldn't delete. When I tried to delete it Windows said file not found. Yet I could not delete the directory because there was a file in the directory. I rebooted ran checkdsk, nothing. I tried deleting from the command line, using 4nt, using rm -rf nothing worked. Finally, I realized that the path of the file was > 256 characters. After googling I found that rd /s on the directory where the file lives works. This was really bizarre. Windows allowed me to create a file whose path was > 256 characters and then couldn't deal with it. Why is a Windows 2000 NTFS file system limited to a path of 256 characters?
Post #172,851 by pwhysall 9/6/04 12:44:32 PM Reply	Think positive. Use this file to store things you absolutely must not lose. Peter [link\|http://www.debian.org\|Shill For Hire] [link\|http://www.kuro5hin.org\|There is no K5 Cabal] [link\|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org\|Blog]
Post #172,852 by scoenye 9/6/04 12:45:58 PM Reply	It's the API again NTFS itself will handle paths up to 32000 characters. The ANSI file I/O API is the one that imposes the 256 character limit. The Unicode API calls can be coaxed to use the full path length, but that API is apparently incomplete. I.e. there are instances where an ANSI call has no Unicode equivalent, so you're stuck if you need one of those. My guess is that M$ avoided that trap by restricting all stock file access utilities to the ANSI API calls.
Post #172,880 by altmann 9/6/04 7:50:38 PM Reply	Another potential solution for next time [link\|http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;180410\|http://support.micro...d=kb;EN-US;180410] -- Chris Altmann

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