I use a few DOS commands and third party programs that encounter the dreaded

The directory name is too long

This is an operating system problem in an OS they have had 28 years (since Windows 1.0) to get right. DOS was released in August 1981. Do you think they could have it free of bugs by now?

Granted I can buy my way out of the problem with things like:

• Take Command – a total replacement for the DOS prompt with really rich Batch programming capabilities.
• http://longpathtool.com which does not fix the systemic problem that Long paths+ file names produce all kinds of operating system issues 🙁
  But buying this does allow them to be copied, renamed or deleted 🙂

But I personally bought DOS 1.0 – 6 and Windows 1.0 – 8.1 and everything in between at a cost of several thousand $$$. Apparently MS does not care enough about their OS to fix this long standing bug even for those of us who who pay, and pay and pay.

It affects internal and external commands as well:

• a simple command

  dir curl.exe /s

  blew up the screen with errors like this:

And not only did it flood the prompt with those errors they wiped out any hope of ever seeing that the file was there several times.

In the excellent Take Command it worked quite well i.e.

If Microsoft wants to win back customer loyalty leaving severe bugs in a product for well over 30 years is not it. Bugs that tiny companies can fix yet a company with over 50 billions in cash and in excess of 100,000 employees does not bother.

It also broke XXCopy my favorite file copier because it is entirely DOS based – at least on systems with long file names and paths. A few of my systems have that issue.