powerarchiver not able to compress / decompress files with long file names

Konglomat

Here’s my problem with Powerarchiver:

I bought powerarchiver, only through this
for me serious bug it is almost useless
for me and i hope they get the bug fixed quickly!
this one seems to exist already for a longer time!

When I compress or decompress certain files (in PA format)
does not compress or decompress any further, but stops
without error message. I found out the problem
and isolated, this happens with heavily interlaced
directories, or for files whose file name is too long.
Windows support for long file names is
although switched on but powerarchiver does not compress
Files with long file names.
Try this! Nest a file with long
Names times 4-5 times in different folders, powerarchiver will
not be able to compress or decompress this!

Konglomat

Thank you all for your effort and for tackling the problem and trying to solve it! I think this is great and very nice of you all :) so you have a loyal customer, I wanted to buy the Powerarchiver Toolbox anyway, I am a very big fan of this great program! Many thanks again to all of you :)

@Brian Gregory
Yes I have indeed tried to use the release version, but there the same error occurs, unfortunately also. But of course I would like to help you to find certain bugs in the program, isolate them and fix them, I like to do this very much, also the 2021 version is still a tick better, because for example the compression speed was optimized for ZIPX, this is of course a great advantage … I digress, sorry, I don’t want to go too much into offtopic, sorry for that …

I was very, very happy to help you, because I am a big fan of this program, it is very useful for me! I like it very much to be able to report bugs, which helps the program to get better and grow.

It is very nice and I would like to thank you all very much and wish you all a pleasant afternoon.

Please stay healthy, we all live in very hard times!

All the best and nice, best wishes!

Konglomat

Brian Gregory

Are we talking long, exceptionally long or really ludicrously long?
I think Windows itself will start to do rather weird things if the total length of the complete path is over about 256.

Mili

Hi @Konglomat

Yes, there are limits on character size in Windows. However, lets check if PA is performing correctly.
Could you post and/or send us the folder/filename structure you are compressing?
We will test with the exact same character size.

Thanks!

Konglomat

I don’t know exactly how they define a “ridiculous path length”, but yes, I think the path length is ridiculous :)

Yes, any other compression program, and I mean direct competitors, can compress and decompress this path length without a single grumble, even for free, which is a pity, because powerarchiver is not one of the cheapest compression software.

This is a path length that cannot be compressed, there are subfolders per subfolder, but they are two folders shorter.

I find this unfortunately very unfortunate, I have also tried in Windows via Group Policy and with the Registry Editor to activate the support of Windows for long paths, unfortunately without success, even at the command prompt, this makes no difference.

Here is a typical path in the as an example, the names do not match with my paths, but the path length is correct from the characters, contained are only PDF files, quite a lot of them…the names of the files are different between 35-47 characters long, it can’t be because of windows, because for example 7zip,rar etc compresses and decompresses this without problems.

F:\Corona Virus State of Research\Corona Virus Medicine,Research,Working etc\Corona Virus Medicine,Research etc\New 27.03.2020\Donald Trump various

Brian Gregory

I did a little test with that path in a PA file and a bunch of PDFs and for me it created the PA file just fine but I see weird scrambling of the paths when extracting in ways reminiscent of this bug I reported before:
https://forums.powerarchiver.com/topic/6239/

Have you tried going back to the release version rather than using this preview version?

Mili

thanks for the information everyone

I setup the exact same folder structure as in @Konglomat 's example, and compressed a PDF file with 47 characters in the file name and was not able to extract it via PowerArchiver.
We have logged this in for fixing.

thanks again for the help!

Konglomat