Quade wrote:As D says. There's a windows wide 255 char limit to how long the path and the filename combined can be. If you make it longer than that, Windows explorer can't process the files. Considering that that's a hard limit. You have to live within that limit. So, path name, path in RAR file name and filename all combined have to be under 255 characters. Newin will strip down the path and filenames if it has to to land the files but, there's only so much it can do.
Actually, it depends on which Windows API you use, assuming IIRC Windows NT or newer.
The old API has a 260-char restriction for the full path, including drive letter. The newer Unicode enabled API has a 32,767 unicode entity limit and usually a 255 entity per "component" (directory or filename), but the later is a per-filesystem setting ("entity" is basically character).
No big prize for correctly guessing that MS uses the old API in their Explorer and a few other of their programs. As I understand it most other programs handles it fine, this includes several (all?) of the third-part Explorer replacements and many of MS's other programs.
I first ran into this on Windows XP when I managed to creath paths in Cygwin that couldn't be accessed via Explorer, nor deleted via it because it tries to traverse it first... Everything else I could find had no problems with it, but I could have missed something. And "subst" or junction points can be used to access valid long pathnames via a shorter pathname!
So it might be technically possible to implement but the Explorer issue makes it painful. There's also a number of smaller gotchas due to other functions that is limited to PATH_MAX (260 characters) and thus needs to be reimplemented by the programmer.