cvs update - cannot open temp file for writing no such file or directory

Question

Disclaimer: This isn't my repo, I'm trying to help a developer access theirs.

When checking out code (windows server 2003, tortoiseCVS 1.12.5), CVS displays many errors:

cvs udpate: cannot open temp file _new_r_cl_elementBeanInternalHome_12345b.class for writing

Eventually failing and aborting on the error:

cvs [update aborted]: cannot make directory path/path/path/PATH/Path/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.wst.server.core/tmp0/FOO/com/ams/BAR/entityBean/websphere_deploy/DB2UDBOS123_V0_1 no such file or directory.

There's nothing handy on Google about this or on stack overflow so far.

We do have a web browser on the cvs server and I can see the paths match and there are files there.

Anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

Standard Windows API has 260-character limit for paths to any files. If the whole path to the file exceeds that limit you won't be able to save that file to in system.

Try to checkout repository as close the root of the disk as possible. If the file paths in you repo exceeds the limit, then try to checkout only fragment of the tree of your repository.

If you use the NTFS file system and the win32 API you can have as long as 32k characters path length. You may change your CVS client to other implementation, for example the Netbeans plugin for CVS is able to handle long paths, but probably you won't be able to work with it anyway.

Answer 2

In my case I wasn't able to check out to drive D: in windows but was able to checkout to drive c: I believe that the problem is with the disk drive or filesystem.