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Excel can't save to paths over 218 characters

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Re: Excel can't save to paths over 218 characters

#41

Post by oblio »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #10
cstrat wrote: post #5

C:\not\sure\about\the\rest\of\you\but\i\needed\to\see\how\long\that\is\to\fully\understand\the\implications\of\this\seemingly\arbitrary\limitation\-\to\give\this\some\context\this\path\is\two\hundred\and\18\characters\

And even with tab completion that path shows why only a masochist with OCD thinks paths that long or deep are needed. People who name their folders "Documents and images from the conference in August with CEO" deserve what they get. Although 260 characters does seem like the Excel team think more like me than the rest of (more reasonable) MS.

C:\users\myusername - so far so good.

C:\users\myusername\work - good.

C:\users\myusername\work\projectname1\ - still good.

Now checkout here the root of your favorite SCM from a project with 30+ developers.

There's a good chance that you'll run into problems.

/rant

Or wait, let's do it the Unix way! Isn't "etc" obviously "configuration"? And "bin" obviously "programs"? Yes, let's all use short, non-intelligible folder names like they used back in the days of teletypes when we have 24+" monitors. And let's add on top of that some inside jokes from Bell Labs or Berkeley while we're at it ("spawning daemons").

Re: Excel can't save to paths over 218 characters

#43

Post by lifeisstillgood »

gilgoomesh wrote: post #15
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And even with tab completion that path shows why only a masochist with OCD thinks paths that long or deep are needed. People who name their folders "Documents and images from the conference in August with CEO" deserve what they get. Although 260 characters does seem like the Excel team think more like me than the rest of (more reasonable) MS.

> only a masochist with OCD thinks paths that long or deep are needed I'm surprised you can't imagine working on a path that deep. Path arrangements are frequently thrust upon you in work environments and if you have a lot of work (or a lot of people sharing the same folder hierarchy), you may need a deep path structure to keep it organized. Attacking people as "masochists" because their paths are difficult to type s…

Oh I can imagine working that deep - and the issue is never "if only we had MAXPATHLEN set higher our business processes would magically be more efficient". Paths that deep that are meant as markers for humans to read are a pathological case - if you don't at a minimum put a web server in front with a folder to human-readable name in front then all the other benefits of automation are likely to pass you by too.

In short, paths that deep show you have humans trying to do what computers are better at. Schumpter will be round later to have a word.

Re: Excel can't save to paths over 218 characters

#44

Post by rcxdude »

jsankey wrote: post #33
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And even with tab completion that path shows why only a masochist with OCD thinks paths that long or deep are needed. People who name their folders "Documents and images from the conference in August with CEO" deserve what they get. Although 260 characters does seem like the Excel team think more like me than the rest of (more reasonable) MS.

You're assuming all paths are created and consumed by humans. Automated processes could easily generate and work with long paths for perfectly-valid reasons. A limit this low causes grief for people that "deserve" better.

Indeed, I've even managed to run into this issue on linux, where an openembedded build would fail because the list of files passed to a command in a shell script would not fit in the buffer of arguments (about 5K IIRC). Fixing it would require recompiling the kernel.

Re: Excel can't save to paths over 218 characters

#45

Post by kalleboo »

deletes wrote: post #17

When i first hard coded MAX_PATH in my program i though the length was reasonable. Now i think 1024 would be better as a really large file name does happen sometimes. Apple has a limit of 1024 apparently( correct me if I'm wrong ) Solution by microsoft: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bclteam/archive/2007/02/13/long-path...

> "We do need a solution in the underlying windows API, but this would most likely emerge as new APIs rather than changing the existing ones. We've discussed this at length on the longpath alias at Microsoft (yes, we have a whole alias devoted to the issue!) and there are no plans to change the existing ones, since it would break third party code that depend on MAX_PATH buffers on the stack."

And thus, thanks to Microsoft's slavish devotion to being backwards-compatible with brittle software, we get yet another, slightly different, set of APIs in Windows.

Re: Excel can't save to paths over 218 characters

#47

Post by rsynnott »

roel_v wrote: post #34
kfk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except I am on Excel 2003. The company is slowly moving to 201x although (can't remember the version, the email subject was "digital toolbox" and thus I directly deleted it).

So do you work with a 2003 version of Python?

Python 2.3 still had stack traces.

Re: Excel can't save to paths over 218 characters

#48

Post by jheriko »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #10
cstrat wrote: post #5

C:\not\sure\about\the\rest\of\you\but\i\needed\to\see\how\long\that\is\to\fully\understand\the\implications\of\this\seemingly\arbitrary\limitation\-\to\give\this\some\context\this\path\is\two\hundred\and\18\characters\

And even with tab completion that path shows why only a masochist with OCD thinks paths that long or deep are needed. People who name their folders "Documents and images from the conference in August with CEO" deserve what they get. Although 260 characters does seem like the Excel team think more like me than the rest of (more reasonable) MS.

its takes an especially poor quality of programmer to knowingly write this code when the user can select the path - this has been the case since Win 95 shipped when every programmer worth his salt noticed this without even thinking...

Re: Excel can't save to paths over 218 characters

#49

Post by adrianmsmith »

cstrat wrote: post #5

C:\not\sure\about\the\rest\of\you\but\i\needed\to\see\how\long\that\is\to\fully\understand\the\implications\of\this\seemingly\arbitrary\limitation\-\to\give\this\some\context\this\path\is\two\hundred\and\18\characters\

This actually happened to me; I blogged about it here.

http://www.databasesandlife.com/windows-path-length-limit/

Re: Excel can't save to paths over 218 characters

#50

Post by agumonkey »

pyoung wrote: post #14
gilgoomesh wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the names mean nothing, it's harder to gauge. Here's a believable directory structure that might lead to the problem: C:\Users\reasonableusername\Documents\Work\CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet\Non-Project Documents\Administrative\Business Contracts\Fiscal 2013\First Quarter\February\Week Two\TPS Reports Cover Sheet And Memos Template - 3.xls

Yeah, I have seen it first hand. Admittedly, there was some redundancy and some excess in the folder names, but it was for a relatively large project that was organized with fairly deep levels of sub-projects and tasks. If you happened to be working on one of the sub-projects that had a longer, more verbose title, you would run into this issue.

Social implications of a size limit can be quite large. Non tech saavy team forced to restart work (half of them will lose the file if saved in a temporary location) after waiting for someone to explain them this additional rule.
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