Tony Mason wrote:
Were I writing an application, I’d be cognizant of this possibility
because it leads to an unsatisfactory user experience. However, I’ve
been thoroughly “set right” by others within this group - being advised
that it is perfectly reasonable for an application to exhibit mysterious
behavior by not allowing users to open paths that can actually be seen
and manipulated by Explorer.
Explorer should prevent this or at least warn the user.
Either the APIs and constants should set MAX_PATH higher, or Explorer should
limit it. Having two completely independent limits is the bug.
It’s not ‘mysterious’ behaviour - it’s the expression of a basic contradiction
within the OS. Vista is a good chance to fix this…
In my own software I refuse to create files deeper than MAX_PATH precisely
because such files would then be unable to be opened by the majority of
software. cmd.exe can’t even read them… I consider such directory
structures invalid.
Tony