How to name a file with illegal characters?

My friend computer has a malicious file with the character "?". My question is how can a file be named with those illegal characters? How to do it manually? Thanks.

doesn't work for a question mark tho (alt+63)
even if you go into cmd prompt and try from there it seems as if it accepts the new name but wont actually do it.

so is not ascii codes

btw SF_13 the ascii characters you used to name that txt file arent banned from windows file names

some banned characters are \|/<>*:"? prolly others which i can't remember

v_Ln

edit >> dammit swordfish_13 where'd your post go - lol

Hi

Quote:

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dammit swordfish_13 where'd your post go - lol

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Halloween time things get spooky today


I realised what you just said even before you said it ..................what i was using were ASCII characters and not the Illegal ones.................:)

My Guess is this file was made in some font of a different language....................generally Chinese and japanese language files made in their font............ endup showing ????? in their place in my computer could that be the case here ?


--Good Luck--

If the question mark was an illegal character, we would have an issue. But it is a perfectly legitimate character for a filename. When it is the first character in a FAT entry, it simply shows that the file was deleted, and that the operating system doesn't yet want to reallocate the sectors on the disk that this deleted file used to occupy. It isn't supposed to show up anywhere else because Microsoft doesn't want people to confuse the OS if the FAT becomes corrupt. It is just a reserved character/name like "con" or "com1" or "aux", etc. Imagine the headaches people would have trying to delete a file named "aux" or something.

Anyways, it is possible. It isn't illegal. It is just something Windows has liked to avoid ever since the days of DOS when FAT was introduced, and NTFS built off of it.


Freaky, huh? :cool:

according to this microsoft article they are quite easy to remove... (so the inverse is also very easily possible)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q120716/