How to enable long paths on Windows 11 Home?
Sep 9
I need to enable long paths but my Windows 11 Home edition does not have the group policy editor.
Is there a way to enable this from the command line or install group policy editor on my machine?
1 answer
Accepted answer · original discussion
Sep 10
The proper way to enable long paths in Windows is documented here
It can be implemented by dropping the following into a .reg file and running it if you aren't comfortable editing the registry directly.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem]
"LongPathsEnabled"=dword:00000001
The real problem 90% of the time is going to be getting applications to support it and not the file system. Programmers hardcode MAX_PATH (260 chars) into their code and have been doing so for many many years.
It is lazy programming rather than using the windows heap to store the path names.
Some applications are written well enough to get around this but you will find more that don't work than do.
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Sep 11