[Rd] long path names (more than 260 chars) not working under Windows OS, longPathAware missing in exe manifests?

[Tomas Kalibera]

On 2/14/23 12:11, Roman Hille wrote:
> Can you help please?
>
> All file und dir funktions and also basename() do not work in R under Windows OS
> if the path is longer than 260 characters.
> The problem seems to be, that the manifest for all R executables do not have the longPathAware switch in the manifest.
> (The registry and or the group policy for the long path name support are enabled)
>
> This is the correct extension for the manifest of the executables.
> <ws2:longPathAware>true</ws2:longPathAware>
>
> Is it possible to add this into all manifests for windows executables?
> Or is ther an other opportunity?
>
> Snippet from Microsoft:
>
> <application xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v3">
> <windowsSettings xmlns:ws2="http://schemas.microsoft.com/SMI/2016/WindowsSettings">
> <ws2:longPathAware>true</ws2:longPathAware>
> </windowsSettings>
> </application>

Declaring that R is long path aware is indeed easy, however, before we 
can do this, we actually have to make it long path aware, which is a lot 
of work. Incidentally it is work in progress, I've been working on that 
in the last few weeks.

Currently, neither R-devel nor any released version of R is long path 
aware. One possible work-around is to use mapped drives to make the 
paths shorter.

Whenever possible, it is better to make the paths short, anyway, because 
a number of other applications as well as some parts of Windows don't 
support long paths. Very likely this will also be the case of 
contributed packages. Indeed, and consequently, a number of users will 
not enable long paths on their systems.

Best
Tomas

>
> Roman
>
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