phobo's std.file is completely broke!

[WebFreak001]

On Friday, 14 September 2018 at 19:06:14 UTC, Josphe Brigmo wrote:
> For very long file names it is broke and every command fails. 
> These paths are not all that long but over 256 limit. (For 
> windows)
>
> The problem this causes can be disastrous. If some check fails 
> and runs code that isn't mean to run if the file exists, it 
> could destroy data.
>
>
> I replaced many of the std.file functions with 
> executeShell(...) and using command line functions and they 
> work. But then my code was still failing and it was because 
> exist was returning false even though the file exists.
>
> I'm sure this is not a big deal to some...

this is an issue with the Win32 API having that 260 character 
limit. To work around it, you can use the special path syntax 
Microsoft allows you to do, which will pass the string you 
provide directly to the Filesystem instead of parsing it, 
effectively raising your limit to whatever the Filesystem limits 
to.

See also their official site on this: 
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/FileIO/naming-a-file#maximum-path-length-limitation

C:/Some/Very/Long/Path.txt

should then become

\\?\C:\Some\Very\Long\Path.txt

converting / to \ is important because according to the docs 
windows doesn't do it with the \\?\ prefix. You also have to 
normalize the path beforehand (i.e. remove ..\ and .\ because 
they would be treated as actual folder names)


To change a server path such as

\\share\public

you change it to

\\?\UNC\share\public



There are also some other useful things in there you might want 
to look at too like the special files such as COM1