And a Path can be up to 260 characters in length.įor example, let's say you have a file named 'My Text File.txt' in a Sub-Folder of your Documents Folder called 'Simply Text Files'. A Path to a network Folder and File will contain just two ( 2) backslashes ( \\) at the beginning. The Path to a Folder or File on your computer will contain a drive letter ( C:\, D:\, etc.) at the beginning. A Path is a string of Folder, Sub-Folder, File, backslashes, and sometimes a volume name ( drive letter). So, when you include the names of the Folder, Sub-Folder(s), and File together, it is called a Path. All of these names factor into the 255 character limit. So, the File's actual name consists of the Folder and Sub-Folder name(s) as well.
Technically, Folders are also a File but with a unique attribute designating it as a Folder.Īnd Folder and Sub-Folder names are also included in the full name of the File. Now allot of people think that the maximum length for the name of a File in Windows is 255 characters. But I ran into a problem, file names that were too long. He asked that I put them onto an external drive for storage. I recently recovered files from several Windows computers for a client. Did you know that there is a limit to how long a file name can be? Did you know that the character limit also includes the folder name? And what about the Path? Let's take a look at the long folder and file names in Windows.
