M$ Windows Bullshitery Part 1

October 20th 2021

Today I cleaned up one of my drives and while doing so I got an error message saying Item Not Found.... "Whatever" I thought and happily clicked skip.

After finishing I checked again and saw the folder I deleted before but only containing a single file. I tried to move, delete and rename it but nothing would work. Always the same error message.

This is what the file explorer will tell you

"Fuck this" I said to myself and opened up a command prompt. Just to realize it's as nearly as useless as the explorer.

When trying with the command line and using auto-complete I finally saw the trailing whitespace

The Solution

del "\\?\C:\test\file-with-space-after.extension "

Or just use Linux because it doesn't have such problems. You can touch grep cat rm mv or whatever every file no matter how many whitespaces it has after the extension.

More information can be found here: docs.microsoft.com