If the directory contains more files than can be displayed on a single screen, use the command DIR /X /P instead, so that it will pause at every screen length so you can examine the file list. Then, enter the following command in the Command Prompt window: DIR /X A Command Prompt window will open, focused on the directory you’re in.
Press and hold Shift, then right-click on an empty area. Open File Explorer and navigate to the directory where your files are located. In order to delete a too-long-file, all you need to do is open a command prompt in the directory where the file is located and use a simple command to get the short file name. Decades after DOS was a major operating system, we can still call up the DOS filenames for files on our modern Windows computers and, unlike the too-long-file-names that upset it, Windows won’t complain a bit when working with those short file names (even though they point at the same exact files that caused the problem in the first place). Windows is famed for being backwards compatible, and this is a perfect example of where that backwards compatibility is extremely useful. RELATED: Why Is Windows Reporting This Folder Is Too Long to Copy? The Simplest Way to Delete Long Filesīefore the Long Filename system there was the filename system in DOS, now known as the 8.3 Filename system (on account of the filenames being limited to 8 characters with a 3 character extension).
LONELY SCREEN CANT DELETE WINDOWS 10
If you’re having trouble with long file path names, rather than long file names, you can make a small tweak in Windows 10 that enables longer file paths, too. There’s a variety of ways you can deal with this problem (like downloading the free 7-Zip file compression tool, whose built-in file manager doesn’t complain about file name length), but rather than resort to extra software or third-party workarounds, we can leverage an old Windows trick to make short work of the files. If you try to delete one of them, Windows will report that the name of the file is too long and it cannot delete it.
LONELY SCREEN CANT DELETE ARCHIVE
So if some Mac or Linux user were to archive a bunch of files with longer names and send you the archive, extracting that archive would leave you with files that exceed Windows’ character length. Other operating systems, however, do not have similar restrictions. The LFN system supports file names up to 255 characters. We’ve talked about this in greater detail before, but here’s the gist: Windows uses a naming convention called “Long Filenames (LFN)”.