Can input command in pdflatex read files with extra long file names on Windows?

Question

Is LaTeX (pdflatex) able to read files with extra long file names on Windows? (up to 32767 unicode characters)

https://ss64.com/nt/syntax-filenames.html

The NTFS file system supports large paths and file names up to 32,767 unicode characters, normally this is restricted by the 260 character* MAX_PATH limit enforced by the Windows Win32 API. This means it is sometimes possible, when moving files and directories around, or mapping drives, to create a pathname which is too long for Win32 to process.

There is an alternative for accessing very long filenames: for file I/O, the "\?\" prefix to a path string tells the Windows APIs to disable all string parsing and to send the string that follows it straight to the file system.

...

Because it turns off automatic expansion of the path string, the "\?\" prefix also allows the use of ".." and "." in the path names, which can be useful if you are attempting to perform operations on a file with these otherwise reserved relative path specifiers as part of the fully qualified path. This syntax can be used in both CMD and PowerShell.

"\\?\UNC\Server64\Teams\Personnel\some - very - long - file - name.txt"

\input{ \\?\extremly_long_file_name } % Will this work?

Answer 1

I tested it only with paths which have < 260 characters and it seems to work (Texmaker 5.0.3, on Windows 7, 64 bit). One need to replace all backslashes \ to normal slashes /. It works also with NTFS large path syntax: \\?\....

Just change: \\?\C:\\Users\foo\myfile.txt to //?/C:/Users/foo/myfile.txt

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{verbatim}
\begin{document}
\verbatiminput{//?/C:/Users/foo/myfile.txt}
\end{document}