Enabling support for the old 8.3 filename and extension format

[wyldckat]

OpenFOAM tends to rely on very long paths for some tutorials and source code folder structure. To workaround this, there are a few strategies, which will be explained in the answer below.

[wyldckat]

Solutions:

1. Use virtual drives, namely to use the subst command to create a virtual drive that points to the starting path of interest, therefore ignoring all of the original path. This is used for compiling OpenFOAM in blueCFD-Core, by assigning the X: drive to where blueCFD-Core was installed.

2. To rely on the short-file name and extensions which were inherited from the MS-DOS era, namely the 8.3 name.extension format. This feature is not always turned on (e.g. on Microsoft's Windows Server editions) and if by any chance you cannot use the subst command, then the other alternative is to enable this feature and reboot the server (good luck convincing your IT admin to do that). The instructions for this are listed below.

Enabling support for 8.3 filenames and extensions

Source of where this information was retrieved from: HOWTO: Enabling 8.3 file name creation in Windows

To enable creation of 8.3 file names globally on a server, set an entry in the Registry on each MailMarshal server (for MailMarshal SMTP, each email processing node server).

1. Run Regedit
2. Navigate to the key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem
3. This key should include a value NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation
4. Set the value to 0.
5. To apply the change, restart the server.

As always, take due care when editing the Registry.

Alternatively, set the above value to 2 and use FSutil to check or set the value for each volume.