Introduction

I have been busy lately with writing lots of PowerShell scripts. One of the problems that gave me major headaches was passing path names that contain spaces like for example “C:\Program Files\My Tools\Make Me Rich.exe” from a PowerShell script to a console application. It seems like some tools can handle blanks and other’s don’t. I didn’t spent to much time doing a proper analysis, but this seemed to be an issue of the command line parsing routing that is being used in each of the utilities. I gave up trying to figure out how to pass the quotation marks to the console application and decided to go a different route.

Figure 1: Big rubber ducky

I created a little script that converts long path names to the short 8.3 DOS format before I passed it to the console application. This seemed to work.

To round this little script up I also added the reverse function to the library that would take a short 8.3 DOS file name and resolve it to its long path name.

By the way the P/Invoke code was copied from http://pinvoke.com.

The Script

$DebugPreference = "continue"

function Load-FileSystemHelper()
{
    $Code =
@"
using System;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
using System.Globalization;

public class FileSystemHelper
{
  [DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true, CharSet = CharSet.Auto)]
  private static extern int GetShortPathName(
      [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPTStr)] string path,
      [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPTStr)] StringBuilder shortPath,
      int shortPathLength);

  [DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true, CharSet = CharSet.Auto)]
  [return: MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.U4)]
  private static extern int GetLongPathName(
      [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPTStr)]
            string lpszShortPath,
      [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPTStr)]
            StringBuilder lpszLongPath,
      [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.U4)]
            int cchBuffer);

  public static string GetShortPathName(string path)
  {
    StringBuilder shortPath = new StringBuilder(500);
    if (0 == GetShortPathName(path, shortPath, shortPath.Capacity))
    {
      if (Marshal.GetLastWin32Error() == 2)
      {
        throw new Exception("File does not exist!");
      }
      else
      {
        throw new Exception("GetLastError returned: " + Marshal.GetLastWin32Error());
      }
    }
    return shortPath.ToString();
  }


  public static string GetLongPathName(string shortPath)
  {
    if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(shortPath))
    {
      return shortPath;
    }

    StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder(255);
    int result = GetLongPathName(shortPath, builder, builder.Capacity);
    if (result > 0 && result < builder.Capacity)
    {
      return builder.ToString(0, result);
    }
    else
    {
      if (result > 0)
      {
        builder = new StringBuilder(result);
        result = GetLongPathName(shortPath, builder, builder.Capacity);
        return builder.ToString(0, result);
      }
      else
      {
        throw new FileNotFoundException(
        string.Format(
        CultureInfo.CurrentCulture,
        null,
        shortPath),
        shortPath);
      }
    }
  }
}
"@
    
    Add-Type -TypeDefinition $Code
}


function Get-DOSPathFromLongName([string] $Path)
{
    Load-FileSystemHelper
    $DOSPath = [FileSystemHelper]::GetShortPathName($Path)
    Write-Debug $DOSPath
    return $DOSPath
}

function Get-LongNameFromDOSPath([string] $Path)
{
    Load-FileSystemHelper
    $LongPath = [FileSystemHelper]::GetLongPathName($Path)
    Write-Debug $LongPath
    return $LongPath
}

$DOSPath = Get-DOSPathFromLongName -Path "C:\Program Files (x86)\"
Explorer $DOSPath
$LongPath = Get-LongNameFromDOSPath -Path $DOSPath
Explorer $LongPath

The Download

The script can be downloaded here: ShortAndLongPathNames.zip

Ausblick

PowerShell gets an A+ for .NET interoperability. Seriously!