My apologies--I did not mean to be ungenerous to Perl, which has helped me solving quite a bit of issues efficiently and elegantly with limited effort, nor to the developers, who make a splendid job. Yet, I use both various forms of Unix (well, lately it is Linux) and WinXP, and I find in the latter some limitations which seem to come right out of the '80s. The 260-char for a pathname is one of them, and probably I am not alone thinking it a bit ridiculous if the API supports "somehow" much longer lengths and the file system absolutely and perfectly does. I would have just found splendid if Perl could circumvent some of these "artificial" limitations, as it seems possible. But I agree--in the big picture it is probably a low priority and my search on the web suggests it is not a very common problem for people.

To Corion: I'd love to, but I am too incompetent to even try. Even for my own purpose, I guess I will simply have to run the scripts on a Linux box.

Thanks,