Question

I have trouble here using fopen to open files which have paths longer than the 260 characters supported by Windows natively.

I found out about the prefix \\\\?\\ which I need to put in front of the path to be able to handle the file.

My question is: Is this still valid in combination with fopen? I have still trouble to open the files, but I do not find information about it. My paths look like:

\\\\?\\C:\\Deposit\\Source\\Here_Comes_Now_A_List_Of_Many_Subdirs_And_A_Long_File_Name

I am not able to use the Windows API due to the requirement to write a cross-platform tool.

Answer 1

You could work around this limitation in a cross-platform way with conditional compilation:

#ifdef WIN32
     myFile = _wfopen( ... )
#else
     myFile = fopen( ... )
#endif

I think any non-trivial cross-platform project will have to do this somewhere, or else use a library (like SDL) that does.