Monitoring Subdirectories

General Support / Questions
1

Monitoring subdirectories only seems to work on the first two layers of subdirectories but not the third:

c:\Videos\Titles\Seasons\

It appears if you monitor “Videos” and check the monitor subdirectories option, MCEBuddy only looks down to “Titles” and not “Seasons.”

Is this correct?

2

No limit, I just tested 10 levels of nested sub directories and it’s working. Most likely the directory paths’ may be too long or the security permissions are preventing the engine from traversing it. If you open your mcebuddy.log file and search for your directory name you’ll see what’s going on.

3

Hi Goose, thanks for the reply…

Here is what I am seeing in the log file:

ERROR> 2020-12-12T21:48:36 MCEBuddy.Engine.QueueManager --> Unable to search for files in location E:\ServerFolders\Videos\TV Shows\Recorded for monitor task Plex Recorded TV
ERROR : The specified path, file name, or both are too long. The fully qualified file name must be less than 260 characters, and the directory name must be less than 248 characters.

I don’t believe I can create fully qualified file names longer than 256 characters on NTFS.

As for permissions, I believe MCEBuddy is pretty much running with admin rights currently.

I can point MCEBuddy at a “Title” subdirectory of the above directory in the Monitor Location script, such as:
“E:\ServerFolders\Videos\TV Shows\Recorded\American Experience (1988)”
…and MCEBuddy finds and converts all the files in the Season 01,02,03,etc. subdirectories.

Any other ideas?

4

That’s a windows limitation, not MCEBuddy. Windows is unable to process it and is throwing the error.

5

Sorry if I’m confused, and am becoming a pest. I’m just trying to figure out how to locate the problem and fix it.

Is MCEBuddy requesting a dir listing from Windows and Windows is returning the error?

Is there a way to recreate the request for the dir listing using the cmd?

I’m guessing there must be a single file or folder that is causing Windows to throw the error, and I am trying to figure out how to find it.

Thanks

6

Figured it out!

Using PowerShell:
cmd /c dir /s /b |? {$_.length -gt 260}

This located the offending files and I was able to remove them. MCEBuddy started working properly after that.

Thanks for the help and guidance.

7

You can try doing this also.

1 Like
8

Thanks for the suggestion, but that sort of thing always worries me if it will break something else.