As far as I know you can bypass that with a \\?\ prefix in the path. This tells the API that your path is a full NT file path, similarly the devices are mapped

As far as I know you can bypass that with a \\?\ prefix in the path. This tells the API that your path is a full NT file path, similarly the devices are mapped into \\.\ . Of course many tools on windows were not aware of that, so anyone trying to delete "C:/con/con" would run into the issue that they needed a tool which would delete "\\?\C:\con\con" instead.