Problem File Paths Of Over 255 Characters

[Simone Nicolini]

Hello,
 
if you use 32-BIT MULTI COMMANDER 4.1 in Windows XP Home Service Pack 3 for copying from internal hard drive to external hard drive (USB) to certain directories with file paths greater than 255 characters, I get the following result: not all files are copied and some I can not open them. In fact, if these files use explorer, right mouse button, the program suddenly stops (see file "errore explorer.zip"). How do I complete the copy? There is the possibility of going to list the file paths that exceed 255 characters?

Thanks and best regards
Simone Nicolini

[Mathias (Author)]

It depends on how you do the copy. If MC is handling it or Windows (copy, paste),  MC handles paths up to 4096 chars in most places.
If you press Ctrl+L you have a log windows and you can see what error it reports.
How long are the path..  are they longer then 4096 ?

However. Since Windows does not officially support more then 255 characters (Even thou the NTFS filesystem support longer..)
a lot of features that are depends on Windows will not work when files are located in extra long paths. like right click menus, having Windows run the exe file in that location. And a lot of other program will also have problem reading files if they do not support extra long paths.

So using extra long path are not recommended and should only be used if you really know what you are doing, because most part of Windows does not support it.
(However a lot of internal Windows functions have been upgraded to support extra long path in Windows 8.1, so support is getting better)