IT-Admins Tool – Long Paths

NTFS allows paths longer than most applications can handle. There are default restrictions of 260 characters for file-names/paths and 248 characters for directory paths this makes it important to be able to scan for long paths.

Because of shared folders and other combinations and situations it is possible to create paths beyond those restrictions and NTFS (the filesystem itself) actually allows this.

Microsoft even implemented the functionality in Windows, but even Windows Explorer might still have issues to handle those files and directories (a known workaround is the use of the free Tool 7-zip and to use the file-browser in this tool to rename/shorten the problematic paths).

Please see https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa365247(v=vs.85).aspx for more information on this.

You can investigate a path the IT-Admins Tool will show you all files/folders Windows reported issues with.

Please note, you will get back the type of issue that was detected in the “Type” column. If it is a too long path name (from your current perspective) it will be either of the type of “Folder” or “File”. If Windows reports any other issues, like no access to this folder, the type column will show the text “Error”. Please refer to the “Error-Code” and “Error-Message” columns for details about the problem with the investigated path.

Choose Path

First of all you need to click on  to select a path. This can either be a network-drive/sub-folder or a UNC-path.

Path depth

Other than the NTFS ACL’s, the path-depth is set by default to 9999. This will cause the discovery to investigate as deep as possible.

Start discovery

After you selected a path, you need to click on  to actually investigate the chosen path and show all the detected issues in the table – once it finished.

Please note, depending on the folder you chose, this might take a while since each directory and path will be analyzed, as far as possible.

Exports

Export Long Paths List

This will export the columns and rows shown in the table into a .CSV file including the column headers.

XML Export

This will generate a structured .XML file. The .XML file is more complex than a regular .CSV export and is easier to process in other applications.