Scan for Very Long File Paths in Windows with Path Scanner

Windows has many limits when it comes to how many recursive child-folders any parent folder can have. If you keep creating child folders recursively, some of the older programs will not be able to access the files inside such folders. In general, the limit is that the total number of characters of a file path should not exceed 255. If you are having accessing files in Windows when running certain programs in the nature of “File not found” or “File access error”, then you can scan the offending folder using the free Path Scanner tool for very long file paths and modify them to reduce their lengths. This way you can make even older programs work without really having to updating to a new version.

Path Scanner has an extremely simple user interface. You have to select one of the folders that you want to scan, choose the minimum length of long path to look for and click on the Scan button. It will start to go through various files and enlist all the files that have a path length more than the one you have selected.

Path Scanner

After the list of file paths is displayed, you can select, right-click on any of these paths and choose Analyze from the context-menu. This will open a Path Analyzer window where it dissects the path into different folder paths and allows you to remove any of them from the file path – providing a very convenient way of renaming the longer paths into much shorter paths.

Path Scanner

Conclusion: If you are trying to run an older program that is not able to use the unicode functions to access longer paths, then you can make use of the Path Scanner program to scan and shorten the longer paths to make them accessible to these programs.

You can download Path Scanner from http://www.parhelia-tools.com/products/pathscanner/PathScanner.aspx.

3 comments

  1. I suggest to use “LONG PATH TOOL” it is very useful for renaming the long file, deleting the error file etc…

Comments are closed.