How Deep is Your Love? (Windows Path Length Limit)
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 ก.ค. 2024
- Happy Valentine's Day 🌹 Let's reach 2000 likes 💜 How Deep is "Your Love"? Obviously, we are referring to folders in Windows! How deep can we go, and can we unlock deeper levels? Let's find out together!
The registry key: 🔑 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem
0:00 - Intro
0:12 - #1: Windows limitations
2:24 - #2: subst
3:16 - #3: LongFileNames = 1
4:35 - #4: Windows limitations: The Return
8:20 - Conclusion / Outro
----------
Join this channel to get access to perks:
/ @flytechvideos
Want FlyTech Merch? Buy here:
store.flytech.video
Join the channel's discord server "The Flying Tech"!
flytech.video/discord
Follow me on Twitter:
/ flytechvideos
----------
Phantasia by Timecrawler 82
timecrawler82.bandcamp.com
Star Dreamer by Neon.Deflector
/ neondeflector
Both promoted by Royalty Free Planet: royaltyfreeplanet.com
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/...
#FilePathLimit #lookinside #flytech - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
![เปิดบ้านสุดหรู "เเจ็ค the ghost" ลั่นถ้าป๋องกพลลำบากผมเลี้ยงเอง!! l [Nickynachat]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/1xbW4vULqGc/mqdefault.jpg)
![[ไฮไลต์] ฟุตบอลชาย ญี่ปุ่น vs ปารากวัย รอบแบ่งกลุ่ม | โอลิมปิก 2024](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/X_BeGaAv1oM/mqdefault.jpg)
I like the fact that when the folder crashes, it says "Your love stopped responding"
explorer has stopped responding*
hits me in the soul lol
@@That1Dummy a word correction? unfortunately for that correction, your mother.
@@That1Dummy your soul has stopped existing*
@@SpectraMoyai not a word correction
8:21 "Conclusion: The path limit exists, it is not actively enforced, you can disable it, it does help a bit but still creates issues. Then again you probably should not create a tree out of 3000 nested directories"
I agree
@@AlirezA_Ahani you're probably correct. That is why tree probably didn't work, its buffer for filepaths was likely only 261 (MAX_PATH+1) characters long...
very useful comment 👍
@@figboot that's weird, because here in linux we also have "tree" command, and as it is open source it could be probably the same code
But, how should one write enterprise class Java code? I mean, package names need at least 100 dots. The more, the more enterprise
@Nexxol it does its just really fast
Plot twist: 1. Your love crashed his computer
2. He deleted your love at the end
Your computer has crash on your love X)
Monika be like
good.
I once created a "meta folder" (how I called it) by putting the _MEGA Uploads_ folder inside of itself. It created a folder hole that I couldn't delete even logged into another system. It may have gone for like 1000s of folders since it repeated itself so much it ended up weighing more that 10 GB from a 570 KB file that was inside the original remote folder.
I accidentally did this exporting an MCreator mod.
Woah!
Have you tried a live linux system
@@kim-hendrikmerk4163 Yes, didn't work either (maybe something to do with NTFS at the time)
@@okamiboi erase the goddamn disk
- How deep is your love?
- About 260 unicode symbols.
It doesn't seem like much but it turns out to be practically infinite if you give it a chance.
✨ automation ✨
automation, my beloved.
ah yes
automation moment
*This is a certified automation classic*
automation is waiting for you.
2:00 Me: why can't these files be opened?
Windows: Windows 11 is here
Me: oh i get it
Ladies and gentlemen, we finally found the perfect "homework" folder.
Can you put 260 folders in each folder though? You'd have something like 10^77 folders. Good luck finding anything if you don't know where to look
That’s how you lose most of your stuff in the folder💀 it’ll be way too hard to find things
secret trick: type * into search in the top-most folder then scroll past the folders.
(you can also do *.* but it takes longer to search)
@@afriendofafriend5766Imagine putting zip bombs inside those
Some calculations its 4 Seaborgbytes (estimate to fandom)
@@TDXC------ what is a zip bomb
7:43
I obviously don't know, but my guess is that it attempts to delete all subfolders and files, fails, then tries to delete the top folder, but stops when it sees that said top folder is not empty, which would then cause this message. It doesn't appear normally because deleting all subfolders will generally just work or throw an error (like the system files one), but there probably isn't a specific error dialog for insanely long paths.
I'm really surprised the limit is 260. I'd have expected a power of 2 like 256. It's so close, too, but in the wrong direction. If they were using some of the filename buffer for flags or something, I'd expect the maximum size to be more like 252. I wonder where 260 comes from?
Quoting from a StackExchange answer: “Now we see that it is 1+2+256+1 or [drive][:\][path][null] = 260.”
MAX_PATH is 260, because the actual path "true" MAX_PATH is 256, however there is the driver for example A:\ (so you need three more), moreover path are 0-terminated string, so one more.
Hmm. Alright. That makes sense. I would have expected the drive letter and null terminator to fit into the same power of two, but I also understand the reasoning behind expanding the buffer to fit them instead.
Well, you must consider the fact that drive letter and null-terminator are a system specific detail, whereas the path itself is a file system detail. The path on the drive itself is only 256 chars.
@@dumonu The drive is not included in the directory-entry of the file/folder-name. When the file-system stores folder/file names, it has no record of the drive or even of the parent folders, ONLY the file/folder name itself. The file-system must be able to support a single object in the root _X:\abcdefgi…_ that is 256 characters long, so it allows for that many characters for it.
Full path-names are calculated by traversing the file-tree and concatenating all the parent-folders up to the root. The drive-letter, colon, backslash, and terminating-null are not recorded anywhere in any of the directory entries. In fact, a partition doesn't even have to have a drive-letter at all, but the file-system still needs to be able to record the file/folder names.
You poured such dedication into this one, great work!
Thanks a lot!
He probably loved doing it
You mean _love_ ?
@@MTCTpl Yeah
Flag animator gang
Happy Valentine's Day to you too, Fly! I work as a Level II tech, so this was an interesting dive 😄
wait technician levels are actually a thing? i thought it was just technobabble that tech support scammers use
@@verkhvo Nope! It's real terminology they pulled and turned into "jargon". I'm annoyed 😒
no problem
the limitation used to be 260, it was removed in windows 10
reason why it doesnt work on explorer is because it attempts recursion processing and freezes at it due to the aforementioned limits.
the progress bar should give you that indication; in fact notice the number it freezes at
260 byte is the Windows API limit, which is inherited from MS-DOS. I think native NT allows 32768 utf-16 code-units, as a Pascal-string. This means that, through the NT API, you should be able to create files with arbitrary characters in them, including ascii null. This is a way to hide files that has been used by rootkits.
@@milasudril oh thank you for information, especially about the rootkits
I have actually seen people reach the 260 limit in regular use. Had to rename and move around some folders and sort the stuff that was in there.
@@crashniels Java develoeprs are notorious for reaching that limit. That's why you want to park your source code as close to the drive root as possible. Otherwise you will get in trouble.
@@rGunti yep. Worked at a company that used Java and if you didn't install at root the install would fail
I learned there was a filepath limit when putting folders inside each other to write the lyrics of Allstar by smashmouth into rhe filepath. It's interesting that it's based on characters rather than the amount of folders. So you can fit more folders inside each other by havinf more compact names for folders.
> It's interesting that it's based on characters rather than the amount of folders.
It's not interesting, it's logical. They have to store the data somewhere and the file-system needs to be able to know how much space to allocate for the file/folder names. Theoretically, it could be dynamic to allocate as much as necessary, which would also save space for shorter names, but that would incur a pretty hefty hit to performance which just isn't worth it when for most cases, using a static and constant maximum length is good enough. 🤷
4:30 i like how it looks like the folders are watching a "staduim"
7:12 Your Love (Not Responding)
"How deep is your love?"
As deep as the space...
This was great and you put so much dedication into it. Awesome man!
Amazing how brilliant ideas you can pull from something so simple! 🖤
BTW this would be an interesting place to hide a secret message - hard to get in, hard to move, hard to remove....
Thank you for the compliment
Thanks for answer ^^
Maybe WSL could be enough, but seemingly even Power Shell should handle it, and yet it doesn't. And what if, after creating thousands-folders-deep folder and hiding something there, we disenable the long name feature in registry again? :p Will that folders be still accesible?
@@FlyTechVideos I dunno about coreutils or bsd utils but in Unix land, it's generally understood that a path shouldn't ever be longer than 255 characters, so some things handling files might only copy in the first 255 characters of a path (or sometimes maybe even copy past the end of a buffer of length 256). Not something i've tested, and assuming it isn't a corruption bug, I imagine most developers would just opt for the simplicity rather than the edge case of super long paths. but who knows maybe at least a lot of the normal utilities can use long paths and ignore PATH_MAX.
I once hid my automated test results like that by accident. I had to write another Python script to make them accessible.
Turns out my template generated pathnames were a bit too verbose and the root dir was too far down the tree to begin with.
Happy valentines day my g this is the definition of pure dedication hply shit this was awesome tho!
I used to do something like this on my free time, instead of using a bat file, I had manually created a bunch of new folders and kept looping them on and on. And for some reason, I wasn't stopped, there was no limit. Probably because I was an old version of Windows 10 I don't know. But I kept going on and on until I decided to stop, I was around 100-250 folders in with no shortened names or anything because as I said before, I wasn't stopped.
8:10 I thought your love was so deep it couldn't be erased
That's deep... meaning
Have you tried putting the deepest directory as an environment variable? Or make a symlink targeting the directory
Env vars have limits too. About a symlink, good luck getting that far down
@@FlyTechVideos You can also just make a loop of symlinks (or junctions if you feel like _*REALLY* tempting fate_) and keep navigating in that loop to get to very long paths as well.
This thing just popped on my Recommendation. I also wondered how many folders I can do consecutively and thank you for the answer
I wa thinking to myself,
"Man, the limit is so small and I love to organize which makes it worse"
Then I see what happens with LongFileNames enabled.
My mouth was literally wide open.
Just look at the cmd.
this is completely nuts, I love it, so cool to see the limits of our structures. I wonder if being in this strange state opens for some kind of exploit.
5:12 doing start ./ should also open the current path in explorer (start opens in the default application and passing the directory '.' means it will open the current directory in the default file explorer: explorer
@Watcherdoesn't matter. Windows (or at least PowerShell) understands both. ALSO you can just do start .
3:13 "Explorer usually does not open UNC paths!"
Uh....I type in and open UNC paths in Explorer at work every single day.
3:43 i like your videos because you always do them so clean. Like that font.. used so smart
Does anyone know where to find out about registry keys suchs as the LongPathsEnabled one? Is there any documentation about all the keys and what they do anywhere? I searched for something like that before but never found anything
I'm also interested in that because I want to control and tweak Windows like a "true power-user". The Windows Registry is like an ocean for me, 98% unexplored, unknown, and *DEEP*
@@Rudxain linux is for you
@@pxolqopt3597 true, I tried Ubuntu and Kali, but I want to give Debian and Mint a try. I really support Linux-based OSes, but drivers havs always been a problem for me, and it seems it's just bad luck.
Only 1 of the 3 PCs I installed it had a problem with the display resolution, I wasn't able to increase it, only had a few modes because of a compatibility protocol or something.
Only 1 of those 3 had problems with the WiFi adapter, and the annoying thing is that it only fails with a specific AP, because I used my phone as AP and it connected successfully. I already knew that the AP provided by the ISP was trash, since most Samsung Galaxy devices IN MY ENTIRE COUNTRY have problems maintaining a constant connection to these APs from "Claro". I made some tests, and it's related to the "WPA Group Key Renewal" algorithm
@@pxolqopt3597 i seriously will never understand people answering to "how do i do x?" questions with "nah, just do y, ik it has absolutely nothing to do with what you asked but i dont care"
Microsoft docs gives a pretty good explanation on how the registry works, i don't think there's any full list of all the keys and what they do available though.
There where Windows Admin books out with the info about registry keys. It was from Microsoft Press.
I think it moved from the book to a Help file (Windows PDK, plattform SDK, etc.). You'll only need it if you are an AD-admin or a programmer.
You'll don't need to know how a Windows PE is strucktured, where the ressources may be stored in which order the drivers are loaded ... . It's funny as windows XP switched programming mode (no supressed errors with debugging enabled).
The LongPathsEnabled should come 2011 but there where some problems as not all application can handle UNC-filenames and you'll have to deal with WoW64/32 for 32Bit applications.
Why such a long folder name? You could have each folder just contain the same single character and keep track within the looping batch script.
And from there, would've loved to keep seeing them assigned to drive letters.
Like you said.
We must go DEEPER.
well, it wasent really the point, the point was just to show that there was a limit, but yes i agree, bit frustarting using "folderX" insded of just -
I see you too love the new design of options in Windows 11 and click "Show more options" to see the old one :D
lol its incomplete. By my understandings windows thinks apps will update to support the new one and be visible on it.
@@Gurj101 I don't know. I just think that Windows tries to become Linux for some reason. But it've chosen the wrong side: it doesn't become open-source, it just becomes less user-friendly.
Interesting Video!
Some Thoughts:
2:18 -> Windows actually does not consider \\?\C:\ as a remote location. You can test this in powershell:
Add-Type -TypeDefinition 'public class NetPath{[System.Runtime.InteropServices.DllImport("shlwapi.dll")] public static extern bool PathIsNetworkPath(string path);}'
[NetPath]::PathIsNetworkPath('\\?\C:\')
and for comparison:
[NetPath]::PathIsNetworkPath('\\localhost\asdf')
3:10 -> explorer can actually open UNC paths perfectly fine...
5:09 -> explorer %cd% works only in cmd, in powershell you could use explorer $pwd, although I suspect, that the error is independent of that. I guess the error actually accours because the working directory is that long, not because the argument is misinterpreted...
Well, looks I've got so much to learn. thank you!
@@FlyTechVideos Thank you for your interesting videos :)
It seem I can't post links, but these two articles are interesting reads regarding \\?\C:\ etc.
"The Definitive Guide on Win32 to NT Path Conversion" Posted by James Forshaw and
"The kernel object namespace and Win32, part 3" from Nynaeve
I once accidentally discovered this when mirroring a novel website. Some books had super long names so folders above the limit apeared. I had to shorten them
7:03
If you try to rename the folder, it'll just crash Explorer, because there are literally over 3,000 nested directories inside that folder.
If you ever have issues with filenames or paths being too long in the real world, WSL usually lets you do deletions and renames. I've had situations with pesky impossible-to-delete file in the past like that.
WSL saves the day
Hi wanted to tell you that many of your videos have amazed me
Bee Gees moment
yes! the only legit "how deep is your love" out there is from the bee gees!
@@FlyTechVideos "What is love?!?" - Bill Gates with Steve Ballmer vibing in a car listening to a famous song by Haddaway (is that correct?)
BABY DON'T HURT ME, DON'T HURT ME, NO MORE
(yes it is correct)
@@FlyTechVideos now this is a certified no love moment
Song
🎶Deep Deep Deep🎶
🎶 Let's go deeper 🎶
🎶Deep Deep Deep🎶
🎶And will delete some things 🎶
🎶 FlyTech will help us to this 🎶
Who liked this?
I don't get how it can be a song, but yeah 8/10 good creativity
Looks like something what cpuld work nice with Modern Talking "Deeper Deeper"
@@Astroni800 r/ihadastroke
"Windows is perfectly stable"
Windows:
I don't think anyone would eventually say that.
Thanks for linking to the used audio tracks ^^.
Gotta credit the awesome artists :)
@@FlyTechVideos Indeed 👍, not only people will be able encourage them to continue and improve, but also to find and enjoy their other tracks.
*@FlyTech Videos*
*TEST: Shorter folder names = more folders?*
Is it the total character length of the file path, or is it the amount of folders deep that is the problem? (I guess: Path length is the issue, at least with LongPath = 0 )
Eg. name the folders by only numbers: "4", instead of "Folder 4"
No need to test - it's the total character length.
0:53 Ouch. Compared to bash, windows .bat file language is medieval torture. Reminds me why I never get by on my Windows PCs without cygwin. With bash this is a one liner (so no need for a script file), Viz:
i=0; while true; do mkdir -v folder$((++i)) || break; cd folder; done
caveat: I think this will keep creating nested folders until mkdir fails, but I've not actually tried this to the point that mkdir fails on a Windows PC in case I mess something up. (I don't have a usb stick to hand to use as a willing volunteer.)
not really related to the vid but thanks for reminding me about royalty free planet cause i've been trying to find one song for like a week and i remembered that it was from them, yt history search didn't help a bit
This reminded me of a bug that Word had while I was in school in 200X. Word was taking the first line of text of the document to create the name of the file, but it was not checking the length of it and it could write files that would go over the character limit of Windows, making your file unusable, but it was complete. There was at least one software that we could use to rename the file on windows XP, don't remember the name tho, but if you renamed it the file would work properly with all your text saved in it.
Thanks for that good old memory!
I remember running into this issue when I was younger. I had no idea how to fix it and those files are definitely lost to time now lol
there is an icon to rename it is the textbox icon
3:48 what is the key combination?
Do you mean Alt+F4?
Dang, that was a really fun video!
I want to try this on Linux. BTRFS certainly has different limits.
Thank you for reminding me of my favourite Bee Gees song!
Glad I store all my homework 211 files deep. Didn't even consider this a problem until now.
Your Love (not responding)
5:43 I think there must be something with legacy programs (like tree) that prevents them from interpreting long file names. Maybe windows by default enforces the files path limit so that people dont end up installing an old program in a long directory and then have it not work right.
This is super interesting. Couple of days ago I was trying to restore my Firefox profile folder. I just draged the backuped folder to the new profile, but explorer kept complaining that it can't do that, because path to some file would be too large. That seemed like it made no sence, since I have set the exact same Windows profile name as last time. After a bit of tinkering, I was able to copy it with "xcopy" command, which didn't complain and was also much faster than explorer.
Since i fixed it I didn't care about it that much, but after watching this video I can safely assume, that explorer is just a legacy, poorly written piece of garbage.
"You don't currently have access to this folder."
*So you don't have access to your love*
7:24 i love how the desktop crashes lol
This explains perfectly how love works a few folders deep
Great work! Very entertaining
this reminds me when I modded my xbox original, I had to deal the annoyance of the strict 42 character limit on a directory, not to mention you can only have 240 files per folder at a time.
that's FATX for you but I had to automate the way I upload my games to the xbox to make the file names squeeze in.
Imagine searching for the folder after deletion:"Your love doesn'texist💢"
What a fun exercise! Love your Humor! :-)
In 8:34 on the zip bombs vs windows video it actually shows the unc path
This is one of the strangest 3 am TH-cam rabbit holes I got myself in so far
Welcome to the best rabbit hole on the internet :)
7:43
this once happened to me so i had to clear the directory
Imagine your love being so deep that you can't even reach it yourself! :3
4:27 That looks dope AF, like a weird ASCII effect
When I try to copy to another location on macOS, i get that "You can’t copy the item “untitled folder” because its name is too long or includes characters that are invalid on the destination volume." and copying pauses. Idk about Path Length Limit though.
to open file explorer in the same path from CLI, I use "start . "
I've actually done this with my phone and had to wipe my phone's external SD card (I had nothing on there, so nothing of value was lost) because I had way too many folders in folders (folder recursion). I also did this on my computer, it didn't end well.
Like the ocean? Oh yeah? How deep is your love?
The title has to be a reference to that song.
I prefer the Bee Gees variant
yee
2:12 i also get that page sometimes
What if you active long path, create a long path and then deactive it? The path will exist?
yes, just the same like when I used subst to get beyond the limit
I've had the issue with "downladed media" files that had ridiculously long and detailed file and folder names, having to shorten folder names up the tree to make windows allow me to move/copy the files
In our test in school we had to write a Shellscript for Linux that unzips a zip-file with a unknown name a thousand times and then prints the contents of the file...
flytech: approaches computer
computer: *why do i hear boss music?*
Amazing video! We missed you a lot Fly!
Keep it up!
You can "start ." (with the period) to open explorer in current dir
7:40 Haha, I recognize that error from the command line! I assume what's happened here is that whenever you press delete on a folder, explorer will recursively move it's subdirectories to the recycle bin, then delete the folder. Because of the path fuckery, this process must have failed, but it still tried deleting the top folder. It's not empty when Windows itself handles the directory deletion, so it is denied and explorer shows the raw unhandled error since this should never happen in normal circumstances
Finally somewhere where I can put my homework folder
reminds me of the pc we had at kindergarten, i one day decided that only i should be able to play pinball, so i took the desktop shortcut and put in in a bunch of folders to hide it, only to then get an error saying the path name was too long, i got so scared i mightve broken it lol
I once accidentally created an "infinte" folder chain on my PC. Windows refused to delete it because the path was too long.
I was installing a mod for a game, and pointed the installation into the mod manager folder... it then proceeded to copy the content of the mod manager folder into itself, ad Infinitum
Your Love can't be deleted on Valentine's Day...
what would happen if you continue from the top: create folder0 and move folder1 into it (with terminal), than repeat, does it even check every subfolder while moving because most of the time moving is instant so it could work
1.7k left to 100k!
btw this video reminds me of the zip bombs video
Yep, hehe, that r bomb. I have watched it many times, my fav FlyTech movie
You can also enable long path support via group policies (at least in Win10)
the group policy only enables the registry key
7:19 😂😂 thats irl simulation 😭😭😂😂
Well I can assure you my "love" only goes about 3 folders deep
So if anyone was looking *hard* enough it wouldn't be difficult to find.
💔
Music used in the video:
1st song: Timecrawler 82 - Phantasia
2nd song: Neon.Deflector - Star Dreamer
pin this btw
Or you just open the description and it's written there?
Folder Spawn BAT file still works in Windows XP, but the folder path limit is 22 instead of 26.
I used to encounter problems like this backing up the C drive to a C:\BACKUP folder. Sometimes just that one extra directory level was enough to bork copying utilities. ..and, don't get me started on dealing with oddly secure system folders and symlinks.
I came into here thinking “oh I’ve done this exact same thing with a rickroll”; thought you would be creating a folder for each word of a song so that opening it brings you to the next word, such as “how” “deep” “is” “your” “love”, etc etc. Interesting tests tho!
when u bored af and have no internet at school
Also, explorer shows UNC is pretty cool!
Windows: Nooooo you can't just hack me like that for folders!
FlyTech: haha folder limit go brrrrr
I remember hitting the limit once... I guess I was bored at school or something but I managed it somehow
I managed to do this once when I didn't understand gradle (i still don't understand gradle). Maybe it was because I was using a hard drive but deleting the ridiculously deep 200gb file took significantly longer. I think I may have even needed to install a program just to sort it out.
I have the sudden urge to make a folder named your love either in a game or maybe discord
I thought it was a song that goes
How deep is your love?
Like an ocean?
Hey, I have A question...
When you type in wininit in powershell Windows crashes. But what happens when you type that in? Does it kill a System process or something??
winnit afaik starts at system startup, and when you start it again it tries to initialize the system stuff which already has been initialized but it tries anyway thus messing up the system state and resulting in a blue screen (not sure if this is correct but just a guess)
@@yeppiidev oh, thanks. That sounds plausible...
@@JustPyroYT I just happen to know this because I used to tinker with my windows installation before I switched to linux :P
@@yeppiidev Yeah, why don't have a little but of fun when you throw it anyway ;-)
@@JustPyroYT didn't really throw it away as I'm dualbooting but yeah its fun to mess up stuff :]