PowerShell cannot run Exes from long path

First things first. Yes, LongPathsEnabled is set to 1 (enabled).

Opening a PowerShell window in a deep path (>260 characters) and attempting to execute an Exe, such as "whoami", results in an error:


Cmd has no such issue (and note that Cmd automatically changes the path to 8.3 format):


Changing the PowerShell prompt to 8.3 does not fix the problem:


Based on what I read at the following link, this is a known and open issue with PowerShell:
Incorrect behavior running executable if current location path is longer than 256 characters . Issue #13955 . PowerShell/PowerShell . GitHub

I was just wondering if anyone here has come up with any workaround.

Prolly not what you're looking for

@garlin Yeah, I was looking more for a way to get PowerShell into an 8.3 mode, so the Exe will run like it does in Cmd, but I suspect that Push Pop is the only workaround for now.

I tried several ideas to subvert PS, including:
- Start-Process whoami -UseNewEnvironment
- hacking $PWD or $CWD before invoking the command
- switching my path to use UNC notation

Nope. Nope. Nope.

If I were to guess, starting in "C:\Windows\System32" and running downstream commands to tackle long pathnames would work. But something's broken about the exec() thread's inherited environment.

@garlin Thanks for checking! I wonder what Microsoft is telling their customers when they encounter this problem. Could it be: "We have this other cutting edge tool that works. It's called Cmd."