[FLASH-USERS] Output folder string too long, causing problems

[Klaus Weide]

On Mon, 16 Sep 2019, Mattia Cipriani wrote:

> Dear FLASH users,
> 
> I am experiencing problems when the path of the output folder written in the flash.par file is longer than some value.
> In particular the output files cannot be written completely and cause the job to crash.
> The remnant of the file in the output folder has a truncated name compared to the expected one.
> 
> Do you have any suggestion to solve this issue?

Hi Mattia,

A maximum string length is built into FLASH and used for many string 
variables, including apparently and unfortunately those used for storing 
file name components.

Are you trying to use the "output_directory" runtime parameter with a long 
directory name?

It seems that the concatenation of the value of output_directory and
the proper filename (which depends on basenm) needs to be below 80 bytes,
to avoid trouble.

The suggestions I have all involve avoiding strings that are too long.

1) Don't use output_directory RP at all (leave it empty), just make
sure that flash4 is started in the directory where you want the output
files to appear. The length of the directory name then should not matter 
to FLASH.

2) Use shorter directory names (maybe by having a flatter directory 
hierarchy), shorten basenm if it is long.

3) Use a link to refer to a directory with a long pathname
by a short alias.

Klaus