Errors due to Windows paths too long (>256 characters)

I’m posting this for other people’s reference as it’s something we run into frequently.

The hard facts

Windows has a really low default limit of 255/260 characters for path names. Microsoft’s information about this limit is here and you can see more technical info here.

The error(s)

This manifests itself in various ways but typically happens when SG Desktop is loading a config for the first time, it hits this error while downloading items into the bundle cache. The error can be somewhat cryptic though it looks like recent versions of Windows 10 have improved the error slightly. These are some examples of what you might see:

[ WARNING] Attempt 1: Attachment download of id 3265791 from https://xxxxx.shotgunstudio.com failed: [Error 206] The filename or extension is too long: 'C:\\Users\\xxxxx\\AppData\\Roaming\\Shotgun\\bundle_cache\\tmp\\0933a8b9a91440a2baf3dd7df44b40ce\\bundle_cache\\git\\tk-framework-imageutils.git\\v0.0.2\\python\\vendors\\osx\\lib\\python2.7\\site-packages\\pip\\_vendor\\requests\\packages\\urllib3\\packages\\ssl_match_hostname'
[ WARNING] File 'c:\users\xxxxx\appdata\local\temp\ab35bd0eb2b14c3b9458c67bceeed935_tank.zip' could not be deleted, skipping: [Error 32] The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process: 'c:\\users\\xxxxx\\appdata\\local\\temp\\ab35bd0eb2b14c3b9458c67bceeed935_tank.zip'
ERROR sgtk.core.descriptor.io_descriptor.downloadable] Failed to download into path C:\Users\xxxxx\AppData\Roaming\Shotgun\bundle_cache\tmp\123456789012a34b567c890d1e23456: Failed to download sgtk:descriptor:shotgun?entity_type=PipelineConfiguration&field=uploaded_config&id=38&version=123456 from https://xxxxx.shotgunstudio.com. Error: Failed to download from 'https://xxxxx.shotgunstudio.com' after 5 retries. See error log for details.. Attempting to remove it.
WARNING sgtk.core.util.shotgun.download Attempt 4: Attachment download of id 1182 from https://xxxxx.shotgunstudio.com failed: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'C:\\Users\\xxxxx\\AppData\\Roaming\\Shotgun\\bundle_cache\\tmp\\dd2cc0804122403a87ac71efccd383ea\\bundle_cache\\app_store\\tk-framework-desktopserver\\v1.3.1\\resources\\python\\build\\pip\\_vendor\\requests\\packages\\urllib3\\packages\\ssl_match_hostname\\_implementation.py'
WARNING sgtk.core.util.filesystem File 'c:\users\xxxxx\appdata\local\temp\08f94bfe9b6d43e7a7beba30c192a43c_tank.zip' could not be deleted, skipping: [Error 32] The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process: 'c:\\users\\xxxxx\\appdata\\local\\temp\\08f94bfe9b6d43e7a7beba30c192a43c_tank.zip'
ERROR sgtk.core.descriptor.io_descriptor.downloadable] Failed to download into path C:\Users\xxxxx\AppData\Roaming\Shotgun\bundle_cache\tmp\dd2cc0804122403a87ac71efccd383ea: Failed to download sgtk:descriptor:shotgun?entity_type=PipelineConfiguration&field=sg_uploaded_config&id=1&version=1182 from https://xxxxx.shotgunstudio.com. Error: Failed to download from 'https://xxxxx.shotgunstudio.com' after 5 retries. See error log for details.. Attempting to remove it.
ERROR sgtk.core.bootstrap.cached_configuration Failed to install configuration sgtk:descriptor:shotgun?entity_type=PipelineConfiguration&field=sg_uploaded_config&id=1&version=1182. Error: Failed to download into path C:\Users\xxxxx\AppData\Roaming\Shotgun\bundle_cache\tmp\dd2cc0804122403a87ac71efccd383ea: Failed to download sgtk:descriptor:shotgun?entity_type=PipelineConfiguration&field=sg_uploaded_config&id=1&version=1182 from https://xxxxx.shotgunstudio.com. Error: Failed to download from 'https://xxxxx.shotgunstudio.com' after 5 retries. See error log for details.. Cannot continue.

Why this happens

On Windows, SG Desktop stores data in your %APPDATA% folder (typically C:\Users\jane\AppData\Roaming\Shotgun. When using the standard default2 Toolkit config things should be mostly fine as long as your username isn’t super long. However, if you are creating your own apps, engines, or frameworks, you may have more risk of running into this, especially if you bundle dependencies with your code (as we do), and you have deep trees of directories in your bundles.

Working around the issue

The way to resolve this issue is typically to set a $SHOTGUN_HOME environment variable to something very short like C:\SG. This tells SG Desktop to store it’s data in C:\SG instead of C:\Users\jane\AppData\Roaming\Shotgun which saves you some characters and is usually enough to keep you under the limit. You can read about the environment variables here.

Future possibilities?

There may be another way to mitigate this issue with more recent versions of Windows 10 by updating the registry as described here but I think it also requires SG Desktop to update it’s manifest file to indicate it wants to take advantage of the longPathAware setting. I’m a Mac guy so I’m not sure if I’m just talking crap here :wink:

Epilogue

I wish Windows didn’t have this silly archaic limit. Perhaps Shotgun will look at the possibility of enabling longer filenames using the method in the link above. But after hitting this issue multiple times with various studios, I wanted to ensure this information was in the wild for others to benefit from in case it’s useful.

Or maybe we’re the only ones that hit this on a regular basis? 🤷

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@kporangehat, thank you SO much for sharing this info with the community! This is an awesome writeup. This issue comes up occasionally for users, and it’s always an annoying bummer.

I’ll add that I have a ticket in internally to make the names of the temp folder (dd2cc0804122403a87ac71efccd383ea in your example above) shorter. It’s unnecessarily long and just increases the chance of hitting the limit. I’ve linked this post to the internal ticket, so I’ll be notified when it’s resolved, and will comment here in turn.

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We also ran into this with the pyside 2 framework library that came from the unreal engine. Although I think we had renamed that with a slightly longer name.
I had a ticket for that a few months ago.

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Has there been any motion on this? Bumping into this exact case here with some Schema files…

Have you told windows to increase it’s max path size?

Still testing that as an option but had mixed results after changing the LongPathsEnabled registry entry. Setting it to 0 some how made it work and 1 == off?

Something in me says flipping that switch is not a good idea though, are there any known impacts on with modern DCC’s having an issue if the paths are not capped? I’d hate to allow long paths just for it to cause something else in the works to come crashing down beacuse of it.

Nope been running fine for many clients.

Modern operating systems should have it enabled by default but Microsoft is overly cautious to keep things backward compatible by default.

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