Hi there,

I accidently created a very deep recursive folder structure, looking like this:

"...\Source\Runtime\Engine\Bin\Engine\Engine\Bin\Engine\Engine\Bin\Engine\Engine\Bin\Engine\Engine\Bin\Engine\Engine\Bin\Engine\Engine..."

The path is naturally too long for the default Windows Explorer to remove. I attempted the popular robocopy method of mirroring the contents to an empty folder and then removing both, no success (Crashed). I also attempted the robocopy purge, no success. I attempted to use an external tool called "DeepRemove", which unsuprisingly also didn't work (Didn't crash, just told me that it couldnt delete a very deeply nested file).

I attempted a solution from StackOverflow, using the java.nio library. It was working just fine until I got this:

Exception in thread "main" java.io.IOException: Cannot access file with path exceeding 32000 characters

At this moment I'm extremely confused, as I thought the path limit on most NTFS based file systems was 32000 characters. But then again I don't know too much about file systems.

And even worse it's messing up my IDE (Clion), since this folder structure was created at the same location as the sources. And this also makes pushing very annoying (Git).

Does anybody have an idea on how to approach this?

Thanks for your time.

There are no recursive symlinks involved I'm afraid, I checked to make sure.

I considered the subst <Name>: Path, however there are more than 10 thousand nested folders. I could consider making some sort of a script that slowly reaches the end this way, not sure if there's any consequences of creating so many "virtual" drive letters.

@DvDmanDT:

I made a small script that renames as many folders as it can within the recursive structure, and the second stage finally worked. Again, I'm not completely sure how this is even possible, but, somehow it is.

@Prototype:

I was considering doing this, just seems like something Windows should be able to take care of ( As many other things, but let's not go there ).

Thanks out for anyone who attempted to take a shot.

(Git).

Have you tried a rm -rf Engine in the git bash shell?

And try the Windows equivalent (which is Nypren's suggestion above).

I did attempt the rm equivalent (rmdir, rd), it complains that the path is too long as most other tools do.

@Frob:

Ah, I see it's slightly above 32000 characters, for some reason the library I used cut support at 32000.