I ran into a situation where I just did a simple ROBOCOPY /E (every subdir) of a VISTA HD I had removed from a laptop. There was some funny kind of file link (on all VISTA HD's) that fooled robocopy into creating a super long recursing directory much like Jack's. I was unable to delete the directories with Windows Explorer, or any number of command line things I could think of. I found someone on the net who had done the same thing and they "invented" the trick of using ROBOCOPY to undo what it had done. There is some kind of command line option in ROBOCOPY that you need to use when copying a VISTA HD to not follow the funny (link) files so it does not go nuts and make millions of subdirs.
Tom -----Original Message----- From: Ben Scott [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, April 24, 2009 10:22 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: path longer than 1023- actually only about 200 or less On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 11:51 PM, SMREKAR, JACK <[email protected]> wrote: > some one did something stupid in a programming class. Okay, so it's not filesystem corruption. That's good. > but is there also a way to tell what files or directories are above the limit or can not be deleted From the sound of your original problem report, all you have to do is run your backup software. ;-) An easier method, from a command prompt: DIR /A/S/B > NUL "/S" to traverse subdirectories; "/A" for all files; "/B" for a bare list. The "> NUL" discards standard output, but allows errors to be reported. Any overly long path name will be reported as "The directory name %s is too long". You can save the errors to a file with: DIR /A/S/B > NUL 2>long.txt Then any of the methods already provided to fix the issue. I like Tom Alverson's idea of using ROBOCOPY to mirror an empty directory. (ROBOCOPY is not as brain damaged as the rest of Windows, and can handle paths up to the limit of NTFS.) -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
