CODEWITHSUNDEEP
powershellcommand-line-argumentspathtoolongexception
Peter Noges
Peter Noges

Reputation: 295

Powershell 5.1 - the filename or extension is too long. How to split 1 command with dynamic arguments into more sequential calls?

Problem: In powershell 5.1 I run a command, myProgram, and pass to its -itemsToProcess flag a comma separated string list (of dynamic length), $commaSeparatedList, as arguments. There are often too many characters, sometimes 125000 characters, or more, or less, in $commaSeparatedList which can cause the error shown below.

$commaSeparatedList = 'file1,file2,file3,file4 ... fileX'

myProgram -itemsToProcess $commaSeparatedList

Question: How might I avoid the error? How might i split this into multiple calls such that the error is never thrown? The calls must be sequential too, not in parallel.

The pseudo code setup above works fine/succeeds when $commaSeparatedList is short in character length , however if its too long it crashes/fails/errors:

"the filename or extension is too long"

enter image description here

For example, the dynamically generated $commaSeparatedList has been 125k characters and could potentially be longer or shorter.

how might we detect and avoid the error? Perhaps somehow split it into multiple myProgram -itemsToProcess calls to avoid the error? What would that look like?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 2552

Answers (1)

Peter Noges
Peter Noges

Reputation: 295

Thanks for the comments, I split the input into smaller strings and made more calls

Upvotes: 1

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