MadCap Software Forums

My company recently issued me a new laptop with Windows 10 Enterprise 10.0.19041 Build 19041. Since then I have had problems building a few of my Flare projects, getting "Build failed: The specified path, file name, or both are too long. The fully qualified file name must be less than 260 characters, and the directory name must be less than 248 characters."

The exact same projects built fine on my old laptop. I'm pretty sure the error is accurate because we do have some long path names in the project, but the error doesn't tell me which particular file is causing the problem.

Besides the Windows version, the other difference between old and new laptops is that we are now linking all content to OneDrive, so the path to the Output folder, for example, looks like this: C:\Users\planor\OneDrive - Early Warning Services\Desktop\Flare Projects\CS FCRA\Output\planor\FCRA Help Center and Policies and Procedures\, with the OneDrive part of the path adding over 30 characters to the path length.

I copied the entire project to C:/temp and was able to build successfully, but that would only be a temporary fix as nothing gets backed up that way.

Our IT department went into the registry and enabled Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\LongPathsEnabled but that did not solve the problem.

Has anyone seen similar behavior?

Thanks.

I had the same problem, when I saved my project files on desktop. However, we use Perforce as source control, so the issue was temporary as main location to keep files was C:\P4.
For you, I would suggest to ask your IT team to include your C:\temp folder in One-drive.

Have you thought about mapping the drive and folder structure to create a shorter filepath?

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2 ... ndows.html

We've put the Flare projects on the local C: disk, bypassing OneDrive, and that's been working so we'll rely on git as the backup process.

Thanks for the suggestions.