Windows has a limit on the length of file paths

While moving a folder, with many subdirectories, to the Recycle Bin under Windows XP:

I wondered if each file that is stored in the recycle bin has a "original path" attribute, with a max length 256 chars, and that stores the original path like "Dir1Dir2Dir3file.txt". Maybe if files are nested too deeply that attribute cannot hold the value?

It really seems that Windows does indeed have a path length limit.

While checking some files into a subversion repository:

The repository was D:\Adrian\my-respository
Within the repository I had quite a deep directory structure, to access this particular project
Within this particular project, the IDE I was using had a few levels of directories, to include "work/src" and so on
The class path of the Java classes was quite deep, "com/company/project" etc
Subversion itself puts a few levels of dirs in ".svn/text-base" and so on

While checking in all this stuff, I got the error "path invalid" suddenly. And opening the created .svn directory in Windows Explorer, right-clicking, and chooseing "new directory" immediately brought up the error:

Cannot create 'New Folder': path invalid

So it seems paths have a limit in Windows. The existing working path was 220 characters long, with 20 directories including the working directory and the hard disk's root directory.

This is all very annoying, as I can't really do anything about any of the above reasons why the path is so long.

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