Can't open portable calibre due to too long path.

[Kythe42]

I'm currently trying to run portable calibre off of an external HD while one of my laptops is out for repairs. It doesn't want to open where I currently have the folder saved due to the file path being too long. Now I recall having this problem once before, but was able to fix it after shortening some folder names. However, it seems like the character limit is less than it used to be? I don't recall what it was before, but now it's telling me it has to be less than 59 characters. This seems very prohibitively short.

My laptop backups are meant to closely mirror the file structure of the laptop to make backups simple and easy and so I can easily find things on the backup. Of course there are extra folders in the path because I have more than one backup on the external HD. I have made some adjustments to folder names again where I feel able to, but the path name is still too long.

I don't understand why the character limit was shortened. Does this have to do with the fact that the backup was done on a windows 10 device and I'm trying to run it from the external HD on a windows 8 device now? Does this have anything to do with the version of Calibre I'm running? I haven't updated in awhile so I'm running Calibre 4.13. The version I was using the last time I tried running this from an external HD was 3.39.1.

Thanks in advance for your help.

[kovidgoyal]

There has been no change in the limit, its always been fiftyish characters. The only change is that now the limit is checked by calibre-portable.exe itself, rather than failing later.

[Kythe42]

I found an older thread about the same issue that said it was 75 characters...

All I can say is that I had no trouble using portable calibre from the external HD with the folder adjustments I made previously. The current path is actually slightly shorter now than the old one which worked and it still says it's too long. Though I attempted to open the other backup that had previously worked fine and that won't open now. No error message with it, just nothing happens when attempting to open it. Though it's possible I'm mis-remembering. I may never have attempted to run calibre from the external HD with that specific version and it may have been an older one. In any case, it did work at one point.

[kovidgoyal]

75 characters is the limit for the path to the calibre *library* folder not the path to the calibre portable folder, which must be shorter since it *contains* the library folder. And yes, if you used a longer path you may never have run into issues until you finally had a book with a long enough title/author. At which point things would break. To prevent that breakage is why calibre-portable.exe now checks path length limitations.

[PeterT]

I wonder if the Windows subst command could help?

Subst [driveletter]: [a long path name]

This would let you access [a long path name] as the drive you've specified.

[Kythe42]

I couldn't figure out how to get the whole mapping to a drive thing to work a couple of years ago when I last had this issue and it's still over my head. Although I'm the most tech savvy in my household, I fear my tech skills are sub-mediocre compared to others on this forum. All I know is that I never have this problem with opening things from the external hard drive that have a significantly longer path than calibre does. I'm talking things that are saved to the Desktop folder and then have a few other layers of folders after that, whereas I only had Calibre inside my documents folder. I feel the character limit is archaic and that it should be done away with, but I suppose that's more on Windows to fix.

I ended up moving the calibre folders up one level to the user folder, which is where most of my other portable program folders are, but for calibre I really had preferred to have it inside my documents folder. I'm not happy with this arrangement of having to have calibre in a location where I don't want it and having to shorten other folder names in the path to names I don't prefer, but it's probably going to be less of a headache than trying to figure out any weird tech tricks that really shouldn't be needed. I've made a note to update the location of the calibre folders on my other laptop once I get it back and I guess the desktop shortcut will have to be updated as well.

[PeterT]

I tried an experiment.

I created a fairly long directory

C:\Users\peter\Documents\12345678\23456789\34567890\4567890\567890\67890\7890\890\90\0

and tried to install calibre portable in it. As expected, the error message that the path was too long was presented.

I did a

subst y: C:\Users\peter\Documents\12345678\23456789\34567890\4567890\567890\67890\7890\890\90\0

followed by

c:\Users\peter\Downloads\calibre-portable-installer-4.21.0.exe y:.\calibre_portable

and had no issues at all installing it, or subsequently running calibre_portable from the y: drive/

[Kythe42]

Glad it worked for you. Unfortunately this doesn't make the process any more comprehensible to me. People did try to help me out with it a couple of years back when this problem was first coming up and I couldn't get it to work. It's not worth the time and frustration trying to figure it out again, and feels kind of ridiculous to go through all of that when moving the calibre folder and shortening some of the folder names was a very quick process, even if I'm not happy about being forced to alter things.

Funny enough, one of the folders in the path that I shortened was "FreeFileSync" which was what I used to do the backup and it was shortened to "FFS". I can't read that though and not hear "For f**k's sake..." in my head which pretty well sums up my feelings on the situation.

[Mark Carlson]

Originally Posted by Kythe42

I'm currently trying to run portable calibre off of an external HD while one of my laptops is out for repairs. It doesn't want to

Thanks in advance for your help.

.....


Hi, it really did my my head this path thing, but I found a way, I tried LongPath Tool Program and that sorted it.