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Comment by blibble | Hacker News Reader

powershell is still built on crap

I had it randomly throwing exceptions the other day that a path was too long

(it was only about 300 characters...)

It also adds it's own special brand of crap .. as in after trying 10x different ways (not kidding: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/...) of executing an external ffmpeg command over several hrs I eventually wrote a one line .bat file* and was done with it. Never again.

* for %%a in ("*.mp4") do ffmpeg -i "%%a" -vcodec libx265 -crf 26 -tune animation "%%~na.mkv"

It's very simple, you don't need any special magic to run a command.

    gci -filter "*.mp4" | foreach { ffmpeg -i $_ -vcodec libx265 -crf 26 -tune animation ($_ -replace '.mp4','.mkv') }

Files with spaces just work.

The irony of commenting that under an article that cites the maximum path cannot exceed 260 characters is not lost on me

how is that ironic?

It's like rain on your wedding day

But the path length can be longer! They just don't care and offload the work.

The maximum path length of the NT kernel is 3276-something UCS-2 characters. 260 is a limit imposed by the legacy Win32 interfaces IIRC. I believe the W-interfaces get you the full-fat version, it's just that they're so inconsistently used as to all but guarantee that something you need will have problems.

The user-mode stuff is kind of a mess. The kernel-mode stuff is comparatively orthogonal.

You also have to prefix[1] the path with \\?\ unless you've enabled a group policy[2] in Windows 10+.

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/fileapi/...

[2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/namin...

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