Why does the 260 character path length limit exist in Windows?

Question

I have come up against this problem a few times at inopportune moments:

• Trying to work on open source Java projects with deep paths
• Storing deep Fitne

Answer 1

You can mount a folder as a drive. From the command line, if you have a path C:\path\to\long\folder you can map it to drive letter X: using:

subst x: \path\to\long\folder