[dixxie]

I have a faster and easier solution.

If you have Vista or Win7 you're all set to go, or you're on XP then you need to download the Windows Resource Kit Tools installer. Basically you just need to have robocopy.

Make an empty folder say C:\temp
Then use robocopy to copy it to the folder that you can't delete say C:\TooDeep

robocopy C:\temp C:\TooDeep /E /MIR

The /MIR option makes robocopy mirror temp onto TooDeep, or in other words deleting extra files and folders.

Have fun

[sunsmod9]

Go to this link http://www.osmstudios.com/Display.asp?Page=pathtoolong and after download If you have jdk installed then go to command prompt, cd to the location where the downloaded file(unzipped pathtoolong.zip file) exist and type java -jar nameofthejar(pathtoolong.jar).You can see the window where you delete the directory.

[bartleby666]

I was trying to delete a folder which was reporting as bing file protected or in use. I was going through it deleting it chunk by chunk and found that I had a file structure that was too long. All I had to do is move the embedded folder to my desktop and I was able to delete it from there.

[bayhuntr]

Originally Posted by dOSM

OSMstudios makes a handy little Java utility to take care of this problem.

http://www.osmstudios.com/Display.asp?Page=pathtoolong

This worked like a charm and it was free. Thank you!

FYI... What coused my problem in the first place, was using a command prompted and robocopy (robocopy /E /R:1 /B to copy windows user files to an external 1 tb HD. After letting it run over night the next morning the screen seemed to have pages of paths flying by. I stoped is and found it had used 250gb of space and only the directory AppData was showing up in the folder. I seems I had 250gb of paths; it took the Java program over an hour to delete the folder.