How to awoid an exception in Windows: "The filename or extension is too long" if input many MD files

[IgorGubin]

Hello!

I'm using pandoc.exe in powershell script to convert a list of MD files (532 files) to DOCX. The query string size is 58,693 bytes, which exceeds the Windows maximum query string limit of 32,767 bytes.

I was wondering if it's possible to pass in pandoc a list of absolute paths of MD files in a one TXT file to reduce the size of the query string. If so, how do I do this?

[jgm]

Concatenate the files and pipe the result into pandoc ?

[IgorGubin]

I suggest additional to consider the option of changing the input string of arguments.
In my opinion, to avoid sinking end users to pandoc's internal abstractions, it would be simpler to add a file list in a UTF8 text file with a predefined name (say, input_files.txt or order.txt), with each line defining the absolute path to a file each with a specific extension (in my case, *.MD). This would, of course, require a slight modification to the input parameter parser to obtain the list of input files either directly from the params string or to read the list of files from specific input file.

[jgm]

Have you tried using a defaults.yaml file with input-files?
That is pretty much exactly what you're describing (but with a YAML list rather than just a sequence of lines).

[IgorGubin]

I found a description for using these fields in the documentation: https://pandoc.org/demo/example33/5-defaults-files.html

Partly it is so, but I still find it not comfortable enough, since different pandoc invocations for generating different documents differ primarily only in the file composition. Specifying a different --defaults file each time, with only a different list of files, is somewhat redundant. I would suggest shifting emphasis of using the existing input-file parameter to specify in them a file name in some standard encoding format (such as utf8 or ) and a predefined extension (such as *.iof - Input Order Files) for defining in them only a list of absolute paths of source files. Or you could specify it in the new input-order-file parameter, but without binding it to a specific extension. In this case, the default file can remain unchanged across pandoc invocations. Only the contents of the file specified in the input-file parameter (with the *.fol extension) or in the input-order-file parameter (with any extension) will change.

In my opinion, this is also a good, but temporary workaround.

[jgm]

Your use case is quite rare: few people will be passing this many input files to pandoc. And it depends on a limitation of Windows. Pandoc has an existing solution that is perfectly adequate (defaults files). Note that you can use multiple defaults files on the command line, so you can keep your other settings in one and just change the one with input files. So, I consider this issue resolved. Adding additional options to handle this case is just adding a lot of additional complexity to handle a rare case that is already handled.

[IgorGubin]

I agree!
Thank you so much for your prompt response!