Installing Splunk with a short pathname

The Windows API has a path limitation of MAX_PATH, which is defined as being 260 characters, including the drive letter, colon, backslash, 256 characters for the path, and a null terminating character. Windows cannot address a file path that is longer than this, and if Splunk software creates a file with a path length that is longer than that, it won't be able to retrieve the file.

To avoid this problem, it would be a good practice to install the software into a directory with a short path length such as C:\Splunk.