1. Open the Run Dialog from your version of windows and type “CMD” and enter to bring up the command window.
2. At the command prompt type “dir D:\ /s /b > files.txt” then hit ENTER and wait for the command prompt to return (This may take a few moments)
The prior DIR command has written the file paths for every file on that Hard Drive, out to a text file called “Files.txt”. Some of the other arguments that can be used are as follows.
3. Find the “files.txt” text file, the DIR command will deposit the file on the root of the C:\ drive.
4. Open the text file (It may be many MB’s in size and may take some time). Once open, choose CTRL+A to select the entire text within the text file. Once selected use CTRL+C to make a copy of the entire document.
5. Open a new EXCEL Spreadsheet, and Use CTRL+V to paste the contents of the text document onto the new sheet. Each line of text Should fall onto an individual Row.
6. In order to sort the entries by the number of characters Add an equation to cell B1 =LEN(A1). This equation will report the correct number of characters contained in each file path if populated down the 2nd column.
7. Once the list is populated with the second column which should be reporting the character length of all of the rows, sort the list based on the character values listed in Column B. You should then be able to see clearly where the path lengths increase over 256 characters.
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