Windows XP - Restricted File Renaming - windows

When I try to rename some files via Windows Explorer (I am using Windows XP), I come across some files on very rare occasions whereby I can only add a few characters to before I can progress no further.
For example, if I want to rename:
AFileName.doc
to:
thisIsANewVersionOfFileName.doc
I am only able to get as far as:
thiAFileName.doc
I have experimented with a few 'affected' files and have deduced the following:
the length of the name makes no difference;
it apparently affects any file type (.doc, .xls, .pdf, etc);
each file is located in a different directory
file which are both 'shallow' and 'deep' in their respective directories can be affected;
each file does not have any restrictions, such as read-only, password protection from within its respective application (Word, Excel, Adobe Reader).
I would like some suggestions as to what could be causing this as I need to rename said files but am unable to do so due to this problem.
Many thanks.

Well after a quick googling I found this:
Point A: The limit of 255 characters for Windows XP or 260 character limit for Windows Vista applies to the entire filepath and not just the filename.
Limitations With Long File Names on Windows [Must Read for Podcasters]

Related

Is "login.ini" a reserved name?

I store the MRU of logins to my application in a file called login.ini and I save it in widnows application folders.
I noticed that on some systems — I don't know why; I cannot find a common cause — the user cannot create the file, whereas it creates all other files in the same folder.
The only reason I can think of is that some antivirus/windows setting/... doesn't allow this particular user to create the file on this system.
I solved the problem by renaming the file and it seems ok, but I'd like to be sure. Does anyone know more?
Note for bounty:
This is a related question I asked that details a little more what I am doing.
A little Google-fu turns up that other Windows developers have sucessfully created login.ini for their programs, and others use it in a third-party Windows login management program, so I would expect that its "reservedness" is partially dependent on its location in the file system (i.e. in the system files). However, I don't think the name "login.ini" is a system-wide reserved name, no.
I think you're right - certain antivirus programs MAY be messing with the creation of that file, as it is a fairly likely candidate imho for a virus filename. It looks as if it may already have been used for that purpose somewhere (apparently outside of the US), tho don't quote me on that.
So, if a different name works for you, I'd go with that. :)
Anti-virus is a definite possibility for messing with your file. Stuff like that happened all the time to me when I was using Norton.
'login.ini' is not a system-wide reserved name, it would only mess things up with the OS if you had it in the (assuming your drive is C:) C:\WINDOWS or C:\WINDOWS\System32 directories.
If you just have the file in an application files directory (like C:\Program Files or C:\All Users\Application Settings and such) it shouldn't interfere with the system.
If you determine that anti-virus is a definite problem, you could change the name to something like loginData and maybe make up a new file extension if you want to (assuming you are just going to read the file from a program, where the extension doesn't matter. otherwise stick to a recognized file extension)

Are Extended-Length Paths safe to use?

I just stumbled on this article on MSDN that says a path can be 259 characters + NUL termination, but if you prefix it with "\\?\" WinAPI allows you to use the
maximum total path length of 32,767 characters.
Eager to see it working I tried using that prefix from Explorer (On XP SP3) but it doesn't work at all (on any path). If you put \\?\C:\Path\to\an\existing.file on explorer's bar, it will give the "file not found" error.
So I'm confused. Can I code something for (non-ancient) Windows that makes full use of the mentioned path size on NTFS? Why Explorer doesn't use it?
There is a SET of API calls that are work with extened-paths and some that do not. The MSDN usually mentions this.
Not that if you just type that path into windows explorerunder xp this does not work, because the extened path syntax is just an escape sequence for the WIn32 API and not for windows explorer. Now, In Win7 this does work because many people expected this to work.
Also for long paths, it does help if you change the working directory or open up explorer with a sub-directory as a root.
Before someone tells me to RTFM...
Note that these examples are intended for use with the Windows API functions and do not all necessarily work with Windows shell applications such as Windows Explorer.
[...]
For file I/O, the "\\?\" prefix to a path string tells the Windows APIs to disable all string parsing and to send the string that follows it straight to the file system. For example, if the file system supports large paths and file names, you can exceed the MAX_PATH limits that are otherwise enforced by the Windows APIs.
On a secondary note, this makes me wonder about the possibilities of hiding files (or finding such files) from explorer by using illegal file names.
Are you asking why all components in Windows do not support it, or are you asking whether it's legal to use these long paths?
You can definitely safely use them, but you may irritate someone who wants to use tools like Explorer to browse them. We see paths like this all the time in the wild. Sometimes people are pretty surprised when they can't use MY_FAVORITE_TOOL to delete it...

VB6 Application fails 8.3 path conversion on a single PC

I have a VB6 desktop application that is deployed on well over 1200 desktops. The devices throughout are a mix of Windows XP SP2 and SP3 systems. All but one of these PCs (XP SP2) is able to successfully decipher the DOS 8.3 path (ie C:\PROGRA~1\DATFOL~1\Config\) that is used in an .ini file related to this application. This particular PC errors out with a message: "Run-time error '76': Path not found".
The string is obtained from the .ini file using the
GetPrivateProfileString function. (The string is not hard-coded into the application - it is obtained from an ini file).
Since there is only one machine having the problem, I'm looking towards some configuration value on that device as being the root cause. I looked at the NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation setting in the registry to see if this might cause the issue, but I have been unable to reproduce the problem on any other machine when changing this setting.
Anybody have any thoughts or perhaps another direction I could take?
Don't use hard-coded paths or short filenames. The Program Files folder might not be on the C: drive, might not be named Program Files, and even if it is, might not have a short filename of PROGRA~1 (and the same for DATAFOL~1). Write the install path to an INI file or the registry during installation and read+use that in your program.
If someone was gimping around and made a temp/backup/testing \DataFolder_Temp, deleted the original then renamed, the short path would be DATAFOL~2.
Delete the directory and recreate it.
check the PC. The PROGRA~1 or DATFOL~1 might actually be ~2 instead. Put the 8.3 name used in your code into explorer and see what IT tells you.

How can I copy a file from VMS to Windows and back again?

I am trying to copy C source files from a vms alpha to a windows machine to allow easier editing of the code. (VMS editor is just a text editor and it would be nice to have syntax highlighting etc)
I can copy this across using Exceed FTP and this handles the issue of duplicate filenames with version suffix that vms has:
File.c;1
File.c;2
Flle.c;3
But when I open a file I've transferred, all the line breaks have been lost and the entire file is just one line.
Can anyone recommend a solution to this or offer any hints?
Thanks in advance
ps. I need to be able to copy the files back to vms and still maintain format.
It may be off interest by now, but in case you still wonder about "one-line" text files after FTP transfer.
The short answer: force the FTP transfer mode to ASCII (or text) in your FTP client. This will make sure that the C-files you transferring (in fac all files) are treated as text, otherwise they're assumed to be binary, so you get a byte-stream.
Long answer: There're 2 FTP transfer modes: ASCII/text and binary/image. The default is sometimes clent or server-specific.
Many clients have Auto-mode that interprets the file extension to set the proper transfer mode (.TXT,.CSV etc..)
When you access the VMS server via FTP client, too often the [Win-based] client is not VMS friendy, so it does not parse the file-list properly. Thus it gets confused by version number appended to the "usual" file-name:
filename.ext;ver ==> file.c;1
So instead of seeing .C (and assuming text), it sees .C;1 and thinks it's binary.
I use Filezilla FTP client to/from VMS and so far it does it properly (though version-support is not as I'd sometimes like).
Copying a file to and from your windows desktop every time you want to edit gets old very quickly.
You may be able to implement a much nicer alternative. There is some software under VMS that permits a VMS directory tree to be treated as a "network disk" under windows. Once you've set it up, and set up your windows to recognize the network disk, you can just open the file with a windows text editor without moving it from VMS to windows. You can also browse the directory tree, which appears like a tree of folders.
When you issue a save from your text editor, the saved copy supercedes the previous version over in VMS land. And it mediates correctly between RMS format and embedded newline format. It's a whole lot more convenient than FTP, for this purpose.
After doing a quick Google search, I think the name of the VMS software is PATHWORKS. But I'm not sure.
A few points I have on this
PATHWORKS is fairly old and (as far as I recall - I dont use it) doesnt work well with recent windows versions, such as supporting Active Directory. Within the last few years HP have ported SAMBA to VMS and this is the way to go if you want to make areas of disk visible to windows machines. Should be easyt to find on HP web site.
If you want to try the FTP/SFTP route I would try SFTP and go for VMS version of at least 8.2. TheTCPIP suite was rewritten (or reported from a Unix version) at this point.
VMS supports a number of formats for text files. As well as the complex record structure described above, there is STREAM_LF which is the same as a unix file and STREAM_CRLF
I found some interesting information about OpenVMS text file structure. That corresponds with a vague memory I have of how VMS handles text files; they're not stored as streams of bytes like Windows and Unix systems, but as a sequence of records (each record is a text line). Records can be either fixed width or variable width. Whatever reads the file is responsible for the "paper control", what we normally call newlines these days.
You might check the options in Exceed FTP to make sure that you're transferring the file in an appropriate ASCII mode. There might be special options you need to set on the FTP server to read and write the files in the appropriate mode too.
I'm no expert - let's get that out and in the open ;)
I have been having similar problems in FTPing files from OVMS Alphaserver to Win7 desktop so I can migrate to SQL.
FTP [Attachmate & WIn CLI] workled fine under WinNT.
I suspect Win7 does not like the name.ext;version format of the OVMS file.
Filezilla - doesn't work.
PuTTY - doesn't work
Window CLI FTP - doesn't work [partial file transfer; times out & truncates file].
Using Attachmate's "Reflections for the Web 2011" to emulate Vax terminal - works fine.
Think I'll have to go back to Attachmate for assistance but partially hamstrung by our [Australian Fed Govt] IT services which has the final say
Some editors, such as BBEdit on the Mac, support directly opening/saving files via FTP/SFTP/etc. (BBEdit also supports various different line endings as used on different platforms, which would help with your other problem). I expect there must be a Windows editor with similar functionality - my Windows-using colleagues all rave about something called CodeWrite (or CodeWright ?) so I guess I would take a look at something like that.

Folder with Extension

I'm looking to have windows recognize that certain folders are associated to my application - maybe by naming the folder 'folder.myExt'.
Can this be done via the registry?
A bit more info
- This is for a x-platform app ( that's why I suggested the folder with an extension - mac can handle that )
- The RAD I'm using doesn't read write binary data efficiently enough as the size of this 'folder' will be upwards of 2000 files and 500Mb
Folders in Windows aren't subject to the name.extension rules at all, there's only 1 entry in the registry's file type handling for "folder" types. (If you try to change it you're going to have very, very rough times ahead)
The only simple way to get the effect you're after would be to do what OpenOffice, MS Office 2007, and large video games have been doing for some time, use a ZIP file for a container. (It doesn't have to be a "ZIP" exactly, but some type of readily available container file type is better than writing your own) Like OO.org and Office 2K7 you can just use a custom extension and designate your app as the handler. This will also work on Macs, so it can be cross-platform. It may not be fast however. Using low or no compression may help with that.
You can have an "extension" on your folder, but as far as I know, windows just treats it all as the folder name and opens the folder like normal when you click on it.
The few times I messed with opening a .app on my windows system, it acted like it was a normal folder.

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