When you want to support long pathnames on Windows, you need to watch for the MAX_PATH limitation.
Some tools, like RoboCopy (developed in C++), Beyond Compare (developed in Delphi) and others get it right.
Getting it right does not depend in your development environment: it is all about calling the right API’s with the right parameters.
Let me take a tool – in this case DropBox, though other tools suffer from the same problem – and investigate how they should do it.
Even though DropBox is cross platform, the Windows version of DropBox limits itself to synchronizing files having less than 260 characters in their path.
This is a big drawback: it is so 20th century having a limitation like this. Read the rest of this entry »