How to handle length limit of PATH environment variable

Wolf Geldmacher wolf.geldmacher@abacus.ch
Thu Apr 5 10:06:00 GMT 2018


On 05.04.2018 11:19, Peter Bauer wrote:
> hi,
>
> i was bitten by the length limit of the PATH variable of 4095 
> characters (see [1]) and could not find a way around it. This means i 
> have a lot of software packages in different directories and each of 
> them adds itself to the PATH so one can run the executables and have 
> the shared libs available. Under Windows there is the "short path 
> workaround" but what to do under Cygwin?
> Creating links with shorter names to the directories is not feasible 
> since there may be different users and different directories per user.
>
> Any ideas?
On Unix (though not on cygwin) I've previously solved such issues by 
writing a script that collects symlinks to the contents of some list of 
directories in a few (system and/or user specific) directories. These 
few directories then take the place of the list.

The script will need to be re-run whenever there are changes to the 
directories on the list, but that can usually be automated.

Cheers,
Wolf

> thx,
> Peter
>
>
> [1] 
> https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/limitation-to-the-length-of-the-system-path-variable
>
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