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My wife has several files and folders that somehow ended up having filenames that have caused them to be undeleteable (can't be deleted) by normal means or via the command line. I believe the filenames are too long due to the depth of the folder structures. Does anyone know of a good utility for cleaning up files like this?

ElektroStudios
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user3048
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  • How were these files created? – Nick Mar 25 '11 at 15:44
  • Sorry for my ignorance on this topic, but shouldn't Windows handle these files? Shouldn't what Will Eddins posted be done automatically by Windows (even from explorer) ? – Stefanos Kalantzis Sep 14 '13 at 17:47
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    @Mokubai- The duplicate question should be marked a duplicate of this one, as **this question is older**. – AStopher Oct 12 '15 at 08:25
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    @cybermonkey: And it has a better answer. – Ellesedil Mar 23 '16 at 00:50
  • For further readers, the [7zip Method with `CTRL` + `DELETE`](http://superuser.com/a/78458/437813) is the easiest method in my opinion... – Christian Gollhardt Aug 14 '16 at 15:46
  • https://superuser.com/a/1263183/439537 – Andrew Oct 28 '17 at 00:38
  • @christian-gollhardt 7-zip, select the file and click SHIFT + DELETE. CTRL + DELETE didn't work for me. SHIFT + DELETE in Windows deletes files without moving them to the Recycle Bin. 7-zip is great, I once had issues with zipping something using the default Windows zip implementation due to too long files names but everything worked 100% using 7-zip. Agreed - also the easiest method in my opinion. I wish this question wasn't closed so that the 7-zip solution could be more visible in the form of an answer. – dutoitns Mar 06 '20 at 12:10
  • It's very likely that these files were created by dragging images from a **Firefox** window (e.g. a base64 encoded image preview URL). They can be deleted in a **Cmd** window using the \\?\ prefix. For example: **del \\?\"C:\Users\SomeUser\Downloads\DATAIM~1.URL"** – LesFerch Apr 24 '23 at 15:48

8 Answers8

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When you want to completely delete a directory and it contains long paths, robocopy does a VERY good job:

mkdir empty_dir
robocopy empty_dir the_dir_to_delete /mir
rmdir empty_dir
rmdir the_dir_to_delete

This works because robocopy internally uses the Unicode-aware versions of Win32 functions, with the \\?\ prefix for file paths; those functions have a limit of 2¹⁶-1 (32,767) characters instead of 259.

You may need to go through this process more than once to get rid of all of the files.

Ohad Schneider
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Benoit
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    Efficient when there is no shortname (8.3) stored in the filesystem. – Antoine RODRIGUEZ May 11 '13 at 10:43
  • I had a 8.3 filenames, but they didn't work. This did work. – Ciantic Jan 18 '14 at 20:44
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    This worked nicely with my stubborn Windows Store [cache files](http://superuser.com/questions/724427/what-is-a-0-namespace-http-file-and-how-to-delete-it) that refused to be deleted. Thanks! – Samir Mar 06 '14 at 10:07
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    I had to add /purge to the robocopy line for this to work, but it did the trick after that – actionshrimp Jul 21 '14 at 10:12
  • @actionshrimp, `/MIR` implies `/PURGE`. I don't understand how adding `/PURGE` could alter the behaviour! – Benoit Jul 23 '14 at 13:59
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    Robocopy is what got me into this mess, but it never occurred to me to use Robocopy to get me out of it. Great answer! Thanks! – Jay Michaud Jul 25 '14 at 21:07
  • @Benoit: 2³²??? Holy crap that's a high number! >_ – SarahofGaia Aug 07 '15 at 17:50
  • @bgallagh3r: That's a lot of internets. Specifically, you are saying they win 10⁴ × 59.9 EiB = 599 000 EiB. That's 585 ZiB, or 691 ZB!!! You sure they're worthy of that much data?! >_ – SarahofGaia Aug 07 '15 at 18:31
  • @Benoit: I don't understand command line to this level of a degree, yet. For the example you gave, do I just type in what you have typed there? And if so, what do I replace with what? – SarahofGaia Aug 08 '15 at 00:50
  • Nice idea but didn't work for me with 10's k's of recursive folders. Only rimraf worked. – Julian Knight Sep 11 '15 at 16:41
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    @SarahofGaia, my bad, it's 2¹⁶ - 1 actually – Benoit Oct 12 '15 at 08:14
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    Saved by day... – Manoj Attal Dec 31 '15 at 07:14
  • amazing answer, it feels like old and for mere mortals forbidden windows power – aliopi Feb 09 '16 at 11:12
  • Great answer! Much better than the ones that tell you to rename by hand or delete files individually - with this you can just kick it off, come back in a while and it's all done. Could just be worth adding to the answer that robocopy comes with recent versions of Windows (Vista+) - I wasn't familiar with it and assume some others might not be either. – Steve Chambers Feb 24 '16 at 15:20
  • @Benoit: According to the robocopy command line help, /MIR is equivalent to /E plus /PURGE, so wouldn't this mean that /S is not necessary? (/E is the same as /S but includes empty subdirectories) – Avalanchis Apr 18 '16 at 21:31
  • main example didn't work on windows 10... didn't copy any of the files from the dir...] I'm thinking unicode was the issue in the first place... most US devs don't account for the majority of people in the world not using english. – Dawesi May 29 '16 at 20:08
  • Works great but slow. – eomeroff Jun 29 '16 at 14:05
  • This works great. I am a javascript/angular developer. The modules installed through npm always causes the same problems and i am using this command to delete those modules, I have this answer bookmarked on my browser. @Benoit Thanks a lot... – Paulson Peter Dec 21 '16 at 08:54
  • perfect answer! – Monis Mar 20 '17 at 22:54
  • This doesn't work when the problem is the whole path and not just the filename. Robocopy cannot delete the files in that situation. – Martin Argerami Jul 17 '17 at 22:37
  • This worked when all other methods didn't work such as (dir /x, using System user account, moving file, renaming file, etc) – MKANET Jan 11 '19 at 19:28
  • in a non-server computer it takes about 20-30 minutes. +1 – Ruslan López Jul 01 '21 at 15:39
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From a command prompt:

dir /X

This will list your files/folders in short name format. Then use the short name exactly as written to delete the file:

del LONGF~1.txt
Will Eddins
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    I like that one, it's a nice bit of lateral thinking. – Col Sep 23 '09 at 16:03
  • While I can't guarantee it will work in this case, I've used it several times to delete folders that have invalid characters at the end that make them impossible to delete by normal means. – Will Eddins Sep 23 '09 at 16:03
  • I just used this technique to delete a file with an invalid filename - it was a file named "},". This tip solved it. Thanks Guard. – Charles Roper Oct 03 '09 at 12:57
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    This works for files and folders in the current directory, but if you somehow manage to find yourself **inside** a folder whose path is too long, it will not help. For example, I am currently in a console in a too-long path and cannot even `dir` or `cd ..`. – Bobson Nov 21 '11 at 02:48
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    @Bobson If you cannot `dir` use `pushd` instead. That worked for me. – BadHorsie Nov 19 '13 at 10:59
  • Thank you for this simple solution to a very annoying problem! – DeathByTensors Aug 27 '14 at 16:48
  • Worked for me. I'm on Windows 7 btw – fedmich Feb 03 '17 at 17:20
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    This does not work with Windows 10, the displayed file name is the long one – Loenix Jun 09 '17 at 15:49
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I progressivley work my way into the path, renaming each successive parent folder to "1" and attempting to delete. You're effectively shortening the path each time and I've never had to work in by more than 4 or 5 directories until I'm finally able to delete the entire directory structure (which may or may not be what you want). You could do this from the last child folder as well and work your way up or down.

joeqwerty
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    This was the only thing that worked for me. All the other tricks given here and in other forums such as this didn't work. – Andrew Arnott Dec 26 '10 at 01:23
  • Was the only suggestion that worked oddly enough. – Nestor Ledon Sep 24 '14 at 19:54
  • This worked for me, a shortcut that helped me was `mv * 1 && cd 1`. This didn't work when multiple files were in the directory but at that point an `rm -rf *` usually did the trick. – Alexander Varwijk May 20 '15 at 21:37
  • @Alexander: Arguably, your suggestion is off-topic, because this question is tagged [windows].  Unless you're suggesting that it might be necessary even with a Linux live CD.  Or you're suggesting Cygwin, as was done [here](http://superuser.com/a/817319/150988).  Now that this question is closed as a duplicate, you might want to re-post your comment on the other one. – Scott - Слава Україні Aug 13 '15 at 18:02
  • I thought I somehow made the above work on windows (without any additional tools). However, the way I wrote it down of course doesn't work. Sadly I can't reproduce it at this time :/ Maybe I just missed the Windows tag. – Alexander Varwijk Aug 17 '15 at 11:47
  • The ability to fix this quickly without additional software was a big win in my book! nice job – Bobby Borszich Sep 19 '15 at 21:38
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    Can't do this in windows 10... rename throws "filename to long' error – Dawesi May 29 '16 at 20:09
  • Worked for my purposes in window 7. Had to rename over 7 folders deep. – Damon Nov 03 '16 at 22:44
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    Not only did this fix the problem for me, it also explains how I ended up with the issue in the first place. I must have had a path that was near the limit, then I renamed a parent folder (added something like "backup Nov 2016 save" to the name) which pushed the files in subfolders over the limit. Good to know the cause as well as the solution, even though I know it can happen other ways too, I think this is a common way it happens to folks. – eselk Nov 08 '16 at 20:46
  • The only one that worked for me in Windows 10, thanks! ;) Such a stupid thing really. I can't believe MS would allow files to be created that people can't delete. Just add to my list of stupid things Windows (MS) does. – James Wilkins Jul 18 '17 at 18:55
15

A trick I have used to get round the "full path and filename" length limitation in order to move, copy or delete something is to shorten it by 'breaking in' halfway down (or more) using a mapped drive letter pointing to a folder way down the path.

so you have c:\some\long\path...\and\foo\bar\folders\oldfiles\myoldfile.txt.

Then map an arbitrary drive letter to somewhere along the path so that the first chunk of the path becomes only a few characters long. Pre-requisite - the folder must be in a shared folder (which it may already be if it is on a server, which is where I have needed to do this), and if it is not already then pick a folder somewhere in the path and share it. Depending on your environment and paranoia level, allow everyone modify access to the share as long as the NTFS permissions are reasonably restrictive. If you want, just allow modify rights only to your own account.

Now go to the shared folder or one inside it and share it, or use the command line as follows. Assume you shared folder "foo" as "fooshare", then you could do 

net use x: \\mycomputername\fooshare\bar\folders /persistent:no

and the X: drive now points directly to the folder "folders" inside that share, so "x:\oldfiles\myoldfile.txt" is now pretty short.

(The "/persistent:no" means this won't survive the next reboot and confuse you later on. Don't forget to un-share your folder when done.)

Remember, you don't have to share the folder containing the file necessarily, if it is already inside a shared folder you can just map through the share and the nested folders to a target folder near to the file and that works fine.

I've had to use this technique doing a massive robocopy between two servers when we realised that users had mapped drives quite deep in the folder structure, so they had been able to use 255 characters from there, but that exceeded the total file path length when accessed from the local drive root.

AdamV
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    you can avoid the sharing by using `subst x: C:\Some\first\part\of\the\long\path` and afterwards delete the drive with `subst x: /d` – mihi Oct 27 '14 at 19:33
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    Nice try but when you have 10's of k's of folders nested it isn't possible. – Julian Knight Sep 11 '15 at 16:42
  • The `subst` trick seems to work well, as long as the filename is not *so* long as to making it go over 260 characters even at the root of a drive. – Stephen Chung Jun 04 '16 at 08:36
  • You also don't need to explicitly share any folder with `net use`, you can use the default admin shares: `net use x: \\localhost\c$\bar\folders /persistent:no` – kapex Feb 17 '17 at 22:25
13

In some programs, including Command Prompt (cmd.exe), you can get around the file length limit by prefixing the full path with \\.\ like this:

\\.\C:\some directory\other directory\a file with long name
u1686_grawity
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9

The simplest way I've found is to boot from an ubuntu live CD.

As an alternative you can create a shared folder halfway down the path and then map a network drive to that and do the delete from the mapped folder (even on the same machine)

Col
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    It's funny how often an Ubuntu Live CD will help troubleshooting Windows problems ^^ – Ivo Flipse Sep 23 '09 at 16:07
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    I've noticed that myself, dodgy network try a live CD, filesystem issue try a live CD, corrupt partition table etc. etc. :-) – Col Sep 23 '09 at 16:12
  • This is the only solution that worked for me. I love you, Linux! <3 – David Frye Sep 11 '14 at 18:10
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    Run bash from windows No Linux required. ;-) Also if you're running windows 10 just install “Windows Subsystem for Linux" basically windows uses ubuntu api hooks to get the job done... utils including "apt, ssh, rsync, find, grep, awk, sed, sort, xargs, md5sum, gpg, curl, wget, apache, mysql, python, perl, ruby, php, gcc, tar, vim, emacs, diff, patch, and most of the tens of thousands binary packages in the Ubuntu archives!" This is a very full Linux development environment that just happens to be running on Windows. http://www.zdnet.com/article/ubuntu-and-bash-arrive-on-windows-10/ – Dawesi May 29 '16 at 20:25
  • cygwin is another alternative for running LINUX commands in windows – atom88 Jan 03 '17 at 21:19
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Rename the directory of cut/paste the file somewhere else, then delete it. Works here.

Or just from the command prompt, if you don't feel like going through the trouble.

Rook
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  • This works like a charm. Dig down there (for me, it was super-nested `node_modules` folders), drag it out to your desktop and delete away. Rinse and repeat as you go up a few folders at a time. What an obnoxious problem. – nickb Apr 09 '15 at 06:19
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    This didn't work for me - the paste operation failed because of the long filename - doesn't matter where cut it. – UpTheCreek Jan 21 '16 at 13:02
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Probably not the best way and I am interested to see what others come up with -

I had this once and I tried a few things without any luck. Rather than looking for a good tool, I restarted with the Windows Disk in, went to the recovery console and just deleted it from there. Worked first time and really well!

Also, just did a Google for you and found this - DelinvFile Looks Good but cannot vouch for it.

Edit - Warning, just seen the above is only a trial - Maybe not as good as I first thought!

William Hilsum
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