Bug #18947
openUnexpected Errno::ENAMETOOLONG on Windows
Description
On Windows 10, I am working on a script to copy a complex folder structure.
Pathname and FileUtils work fine for me until there is a folder with a very long path (>260 chars).
Normally you cannot access such a folder with Ruby.
The next operations will raise Errno::ENOENT
Pathname.new(300_chars_path).children
FileUtils.mkpath(300_chars_path)
But there is a way in Windows to remove the MAX_PATH limitation.
You can find a small .reg file in this article:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/maximum-file-path-limitation?tabs=registry
After changing this system option, things start to work strangely in Ruby.
This will now raise Errno::ENAMETOOLONG
:
Pathname.new(300_chars_path).children
But at the same time, you can create a folder with such a long path and write-read a file in it
FileUtils.mkpath(300_chars_path)
file = Pathname.new(300_chars_path+'/file.txt')
file.write 'oooooooooo'
puts Pathname.new(300_chars_path+'/file.txt').read
So you can work with individual items but attempts to list such folders' content fail (.children
, .glob
, .copy
, etc).
In my case, deep .glob
is broken for all the parent folders of that deep long-path folder ((
The only way I found for listing is
require 'win32ole'
fso = WIN32OLE.new 'Scripting.FileSystemObject'
for file in fso.GetFolder(300_chars_path).files
file.name
file.path.length
end
But using this workaround breaks all my code workflow built on top of Pathname and FileUtils ((.
So for me, it looks like some operations with long-path folders are not working just because in Ruby there is a check for the path length and not a real operation problem. And in some places (see .mkpath) there is no such check and all works fine.
Also notice that other applications on Windows have no problems with long-path folders (like Total Commander).
Please consider reviewing if we really need to raise Errno::ENAMETOOLONG
if the LongPathsEnabled
option is enabled in the Windows registry.
Updated by austin (Austin Ziegler) over 2 years ago
inversion (Yura Babak) wrote:
Pathname and FileUtils work fine for me until there is a folder with a very long path (>260 chars).
…
But there is a way in Windows to remove the MAX_PATH limitation.
You can find a small .reg file in this article:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/maximum-file-path-limitation?tabs=registry
It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything in Windows, but the article you posted indicates that there are two conditions that must be met for the long path support to be enabled:
- The registry key
Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\LongPathsEnabled
must exist and be set to1
. - The application manifest must also include the
longPathAware
element.
If Ruby does not have an application manifest (I don’t know whether it does or not) with this element, then long path support is disabled. If the registry key is not set, then long path support is disabled. Thus, even if Ruby were to have an embedded application manifest with this key, then we’d want to have a runtime API so that scripts could determine whether or not they can safely use long paths.
There is a way to handle long paths on Windows whether or not this registry key is enabled: prefix the drive root with \\?\
(which would be '\\\\?\\' as
` is an escape character). It means you can’t work with relative paths and you must always use \
as the file separator, but it always works and definitely did when I was using Ruby on Windows back in 2004–2011.
Updated by inversion (Yura Babak) over 2 years ago
austin (Austin Ziegler) wrote in #note-1:
If Ruby does not have an application manifest (I don’t know whether it does or not)
As I understand it was added here — [Win32] long path name support [Bug #12551]
There is a way to handle long paths on Windows whether or not this registry key is enabled: prefix the drive root with
\\?\
(which would be'\\\\?\\' as
` is an escape character). It means you can’t work with relative paths and you must always use\
as the file separator, but it always works and definitely did when I was using Ruby on Windows back in 2004–2011.
It doesn't work for me, still .children
raises an expectation for the existing folder:
<internal:dir>:98:in 'open': Filename too long @ dir_initialize - \\\\?\\D:\\very_loo…oong_path (Errno::ENAMETOOLONG)
Updated by inversion (Yura Babak) over 1 year ago
Today rechecked that for the latest
ruby 3.2.2 (2023-03-30 revision e51014f9c0) [x64-mingw-ucrt]
still we have same problems (