VB6, Limitations of FileSystemObject

Anchundan · 7 Jan 2015 at 05:59

I've been messing around for a while with creating a backup system for my new Synology disk station. It simply goes through all my files and folders on my local drive and updates the remote drive if it needs to be.

I'm getting error messages when the total length of the path being copied across is more than 255 characters long.

I'm using object.copyfile origfile, destfile.

Is this a known issue? or is it just coincidence that the path is so long? Any way around this problem or do I need to go though all the long filenames and truncate them?

Andre · 7 Jan 2015 at 08:47

Must admit, I've always recursed through the folders, so it's always only a single depth of file name. Don't think I've ever seen a problem with length of names doing it my way?

marc2003 · 7 Jan 2015 at 10:34

windows has always had this limitation. you might work around it with UNC paths as described here??

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/windows/desktop/aa365247(v=vs.85).aspx#maxpath

jsmoke · 11 Jan 2015 at 12:32

It's to do with the MAX_PATH constant, I think it goes back to the days of DOS when they assumed the 256 characters would be enough for a file/dir name.

So the default MAX_PATH in windows(API) is 256 characters although names of up to 2 bytes are actually supported.

I don't know if the FileSystemObject supports longer names though.