| Author |
Message |
    
CLK
Supporter
Username: Clkelley
Post Number: 1961
Registered: 6-2002
| | Posted on Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - 2:46 pm: | 
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The software that we use to manage student papers has done something really strange - it gave a very long file name to a student paper. So long, in fact, that Windows doesn't recognize it - I can't open the document, and I can't delete it, and I can't rename it either. (I downloaded another copy using a different method, so I was able to grade the work.)
But how can I get rid of this file? I am mystified. Anybody ever face this before? |
Brett
Citizen
Username: Bmalibashksa
Post Number: 2174
Registered: 7-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - 3:06 pm: |
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That has happened to me a few times, I used the command line to delete. I only needed about ten letters of the filename followed by *.
C:\Documents\etc\Del longfilename* |
CLK
Supporter
Username: Clkelley
Post Number: 1962
Registered: 6-2002
| | Posted on Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - 4:33 pm: |
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Thanks Brett - that worked. I haven't used DOS commands in many, many years ... amazing how quickly it comes back when you need it ... |
TarPit Coder
Citizen
Username: Tarpitcoder
Post Number: 28
Registered: 12-2004
| | Posted on Thursday, February 23, 2006 - 7:20 am: |
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I used to run into this problem quite often on Windows XP with directory paths longer than 255 characters
Unfortunately Windows Explorer can't handle them, and you end up having to do things via the commandline.
START_OF_RANT
Pretty sad really - quite unbelievable that QA at Microsoft didn't see this problem and add a patch.
Of course the local sysadmin was always freaking out because on that machine I remember I had > 1 million files and about half a million directories. This was about 3 years back.
What really frustrates me is that people considered it too many, but if you scale how fast computers are now to computers say 20 years ago, and scale the number of files there's no reason why a modern PC shouldn't be able to handle so many.
That machine had two cpu's and 3 GB of RAM. So if you do a historical scaling you can see it isnt too unreasonable!
Year....Files...CPU (~mips)...RAM(MB)...DISK
2002: 2000000....4000.........2000......40 GB
1997: 200000......400..........200.......4 GB
1992: 20000........40...........20........400 MB
1987: 2000..........4............2.........40 MB
Having 2000 files on a system from 1987 doesn't seem too unreasonable to me.
END_OF_RANT
--Tarp |
Joan
Supporter
Username: Joancrystal
Post Number: 7044
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Thursday, February 23, 2006 - 9:12 am: |
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I got a weird error message on a windows 2000 computer at work some time back "Can't open file, path is too deep." Could this be the type of problem the windows system was alluding to or was there some other cause? Nobody in our MIS could explain the message or what to do about it. I finally ended up deleting the file so I could back up the rest of the disk.
Assuming click and drag was possible with such a file would moving it to a shorter path (taking it out of one or more subdirectories) have solved the problem.
Example: Disk Drive://Subdirectory A/subdirectory B/subdirectory C/subdirectory D/too long file name moved to Disk Drive:// too long file name |
CLK
Supporter
Username: Clkelley
Post Number: 1964
Registered: 6-2002
| | Posted on Thursday, February 23, 2006 - 9:22 am: |
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Joan, what you got sounds like the same problem.
However, I couldn't do a thing with the file - couldn't move it (tried that), cound't rename it, couldn't delete it, couldn't delete the folder, couldn't do anything until Brett provided the solution.
If you had the same problem, I'm surprised you were able to delete it. |
TarPit Coder
Citizen
Username: Tarpitcoder
Post Number: 31
Registered: 12-2004
| | Posted on Thursday, February 23, 2006 - 11:24 am: |
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Joan,
That error message rings a bell. The kicker is that you can't copy it because explorer can't browse that deep... it just dies.
The trick is to use the command line and rename it. It helps heaps if you have filename completion turned on - that means you just type the first character and then tab and it fills in the rest.
Either way it's a PITA.
--Tarp |
Tom Reingold
Supporter
Username: Noglider
Post Number: 12615
Registered: 1-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, February 23, 2006 - 3:37 pm: |
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Stories like this make me cluck my tongue. I hear people say that MS is on top, and it must be because their products are superior. Ha ha ha.
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TarPit Coder
Citizen
Username: Tarpitcoder
Post Number: 34
Registered: 12-2004
| | Posted on Friday, February 24, 2006 - 8:13 am: |
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NT isn't bad at all - It's just the stuff on top of it. I have had decent success with NT3.51, 4.0, 2000 and XP.
The kernels good - It's just the stuff on the outside that causes *pain*. I found it pretty painful moving from *nix to NT originally - but that was because I missed being able to do stuff like:
>setenv DISPLAY=156.59.209.73:0.0
>xterm &
Having multiple windows hosted by different boxes was just so damn nice. For all the bitching about it X was great in lots of respects.
--Tarp |
Tom Reingold
Supporter
Username: Noglider
Post Number: 12622
Registered: 1-2003
| | Posted on Friday, February 24, 2006 - 9:56 am: |
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That was slick, tarp, but I guess you left X before X over ssh became hip. All I do is ssh from here to there. When I get there, my display is localhost:10 or something like that, and I type "xterm &" because it has established a tunnel. Even slicker. And no one can sniff my keystrokes or mouse clicks this way.
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TarPit Coder
Citizen
Username: Tarpitcoder
Post Number: 36
Registered: 12-2004
| | Posted on Monday, February 27, 2006 - 7:45 am: |
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Tom,
Aha! I do remember running X over a dedicated 128kbps line we had. This was not LBX - and the desktop was SGI's Indigo Magic desktop. It was fun because you could see things that X really cached - some stuff was quite snappy and other stuff was slowwwww.
The MS crowd is finally catching up with Remote Desktop and it's funny how all the sysadmins love it... I use it lots too. It's quite snappy and very usable over a cable modem or DSL line.
SSH tunnels rock - there's nothing like a nice SSH tunnel and then all your traffic going thru it...
My favorite X story might be running Yggadrisl plug and play linux on my 486. Dialling into a 2400 bps connection and then sending an Xterm over that.
We are all spoiled rotten!
--Tarp |
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