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I've just successfully created a path with 66 components of 240 characters a piece, with a total path length of around 31800 characters. I had to do it programmatically, and both Windows Explorer and cmd.exe are unable to remove it (or even change into it) but it's there.



Ah, just like the case of hard links. NTFS has hard links, just like all the various Unix file systems. But Windows doesn't use them and neither can users create them normally.

You can however use API calls to create them. Once you have created the hard link it just works as you would expect, every app on the machine just sees it as another copy of the linked file.

I used this to good effect at one point. There was a website where authorized users could download huge files when they had gained the appropriate rights. They had to be accessed via http, but I couldn't stream them out via BinaryWrite in ASP because it killed performance.

Using the hard link API I could create hard links to the huge files, give the links GUID names and they just direct the user's browser to the hard link. The hard link was just deleted after a specified period. I used the same thing later to make huge files appear in users' ftp areas when they carried out an action on the website.
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