I’m working with multify for a fairly large project. For reasons having to do with the way we handle art assets, we have a Python script that provides every file’s name to the multify command when creating or updating a file.
We’ve run into an issue when creating a multifile using os.popen("multify -v -c -f "+fileNames) in situations where the filename string is 8,476 characters long (denoting 248 distinct files).
Have we run into a limitation of the Windows command shell or multify? If it’s multify, is there anything we can do besides breaking up the command length?
This is a limitation of Windows, not of multify. You can split the command into multiple commands (since you can add files to an existing multifile, you don’t need to do them all at once) though this will be a bit slower.
Note also that the Panda multifile has a Python interface via the Multifile object, so anything you can do with the multify command you can also do directly using this API–with no restrictions imposed by command-line limits. The API will also give you more control than the multify command provides; for instance, you can choose to add or remove files without performing the relatively expensive repack operation each time (though you will want to repack from time to time to avoid waste).