Windows 10: Deleting Files and Folders with Illegal Characters

I returned to some work from last week and it seems there was a code-related mishap - a number of files and folders have somehow been created from my code, using the start of each line of code itself as a file / foldername string: Directory of D:\Work\WT\Radiomics\MTLBroken29/01/1996 04:03 824,732,780 end.13/01/1996 04:01 <DIR> wvalues.= {09/03/2038 14:57 539,898,673 4 with 1.2,09/11/2037 04:03 1,931,502,952 inside08/03/1996 14:35 1,885,696,544 es01/01/1601 01:00 538,976,288

:)

 

How To Delete Folders and Files Explorer Cannot Find

The name you posted does not contain any illegal characters. However, we do not know how this web page would deal with such a character. It might replace it with a legal character. To know for sure I would need the original file Dir.txt.

Yes, illegal characters are often invisible.

I can see three options to deal with the unwanted folder:

• Tolerate it. From what you reported so far, it does not seem to cause any problem.
• Hide it.
• Delete it, then create a file of the same name, then prevent it from being deleted by setting appropriate NTFS permissions.

 

Trouble deleting a folder

Thanks for the suggestion but it says "delete folder failed for E:\....." for each folder I try.

*Confused

Will I be forever stuck with these unnecessary folders? *Oh Well hwell:

 

Can't delete folder!

If you ever get more 'malicious' files that dont let you delete them

Use a program called "Gypo Moveonboot"
It stops the files from executing on bootup, which allows you to delete them without any "illegal error" messages. But its only for files, i dont think it does folders...