Hacktoberfest 2026: the issues maintainers tagged for October, open and beginner-friendly. Browse Hacktoberfest issues

msys2 and spaces

Open
  • Is something wrong?
#183 1 comment 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Domain
documentation

Research direction

Start with the Installation page linked in the issue and compare its path restrictions with the archived MinGW installation notes and the cited filesystem limits. Clarify whether the restrictions apply to MSYS2 itself or related tools, and update the installation documentation so the reasons and practical scope are explicit.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Thank you for creating MSYS2. I have a question from the documentation for Installation. https://www.msys2.org/wiki/MSYS2-installation/ that I searched here and other places and couldn't find an answer.

MSYS2 ships in the form of installers and base archives. They can be installed or extracted to any place on your computer, but you MUST use folder names that consist of only ascii characters and no spaces (also it makes good sense to put it in a path that doesn't use many characters due to PATH_MAX being 260; C:\msys32 or C:\msys64 is ideal). You can download the installers or base MSYS2 archives from the links below:

Would you mind expanding on that a bit more. Perhaps in the installation page or here. The limits described, no spaces, no unicode, 260 characters sounds like the limits from FAT filesystems:

Depends on whether the FAT12, FAT16, and FAT32 implementation has support for LFNs. Where it does not, as in OS/2, DOS, Windows 95, Windows 98 in DOS-only mode and the Linux "msdos" driver, file names are limited to 8.3 format of 8-bit OEM characters (space padded in both the basename and extension parts) and may not contain NUL (end-of-directory marker) or character 5 (replacement for character 229 which itself is used as deleted-file marker). Short names also must not contain lowercase letters. A few special device names (CON, NUL, AUX, PRN, LPT1, COM1, etc.) should be avoided, as some operating systems (notably DOS, OS/2 and Windows) reserve them.

The mention of linux "msdos" driver, does that describe msys2?
I did find mention of this in mingw's archived installation notes:

MinGW may have problems with paths containing spaces, and if not, usually other programs used with MinGW will experience problems with such paths. Thus, we strongly recommend that you do not install MinGW in any location with spaces in the path name reference; i.e. you should avoid installing into any subdirectory of "Program Files" or "My Documents", or the like.

I'm curious and can't find an answer is all. Thank you.

Dominant language
CSS
Stars
3.3k
Forks
446
Avg merge
2h 16m
Merged PRs (30d)
1

Getting set up

We have not checked this project's setup files yet. Start from its README, and see our first-contribution guide for the general steps.

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from msys2/msys2.github.io

All issues in msys2/msys2.github.io

Similar issues

More Documentation issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.