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Certain Unicode versions of Win32 API functions can use significantly longer paths, upwards of 32,000 characters, provided that you apply the prefix "\\?\" in front of the remainder of the path [e.g. "\\?\D:\SomeReallyAwfullyLongFolderName\Followed \By\SomeOtherFolder\And\SomeFileName.txt"]... you get the picture. Likewise, for UNC paths, the long form of the Unicode path would be "\\?\UNC\\" followed by the remainder of the UNC path.
There are limitations to when, where & how this notation can be used. No forward slashes can be used... you must use backslashes. Likewise, no relative paths can be used, so no "." representations of directories are permitted. All relative path values are limited to MAX_PATH characters.
This long format notation causes the path to be passed to the underlying system routines with minimal parsing and/or modification.
What I don't have handy is a complete list of I/O related API functions that support this notation, nor do I have any correlation between WIL functions and these API functions to know for ceratin whether or not it's safe to use this notation from within a WinBatch script.
For more see:
Naming Files, Paths, and Namespaces (Windows)
Article ID: W17977
Filename: Max Path in WinBatch.txt
File Created: 2012:12:20:11:51:58
Last Updated: 2012:12:20:11:51:58