Illegal File Names in Windows 10

Let's hit 3000 likes! 💜 Ever tried creating a file or folder with a backslash or question mark? Windows will not let you. Well, what if we ignore Windows and do it anyway? Be prepared: Windows will hate us. Big thanks to mattx for getting me into this topic!

0:00 - Intro
0:23 - #1: The WSL Deception
4:19 - #2: Drive Links
6:37 - #3: Unicode Tricks
9:43 - #4: Corrupting Folders
12:38 - #5: Caption Contest Winner
13:00 - Outro
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Lots of awesome music used here! (Really, I'm starting to run out of it.)

Thank you for offering us this awesome music for free, and thanks to RoyaltyFreePlanet for making it known! :)

#lookinside #disallowednames #flytech

[____.__._.._]

Windows: I like when users are calm and doesn't mess with me
Fly and Enderman: Let us introduce ourselves...

[KoczulMoczul]

Legend has it that Automatic Repair actually repaired something. Oh wait... It turns out that's true

[__builtin_popcount]

9:23 The reason typing a ? directly works is because it's the wildcard symbol for one character, just like * is for multiple. Therefore, o? matches any folder with a two-letter name starting with o. Once you have two folders that fit the pattern, PowerShell doesn't know which one you mean and tells you.
The same will happen if you have two folders named e.g. oa and ob, and try running cd o?. It will work if you have just one, but not with two or more.

[maximized]

NTFS: I fear no men
But this thing
It scares me
<corrupt, >corrupt

[swordcrafted]

Windows: you cant use disallowed filenames in ntfs with ME!
FlyTech: i know but he can
*points to flytech*

[R.B.]

Windows 3.1 had interesting filename support. Before LFN, I used to use BASIC to make folders with spaces in the names. It didn't like that. I also used it to add an unprintable character to the filename. You could access the folder using the command prompt, but Windows File Manager didn't know how to open it. With few tech savvy people at the time, this was a decently safe way to hide files in plain sight that only I knew how to open.

[aviaviate]

"Are you noticing a pattern here? All of them are starting with F0. Could this mean something? Let's find out."
So the F-Zero franchise *isn't* dead!?

[VDani]

Wow! I am impressed! Windows self repairing actually works in some situations! It isn't that useless. The first time I saw Windows repair working.

[Austeja]

NTFS is case sensitive but Windows is not
Im intrested how this could break

[Steets]

Fly: "I'm going to break Windows"
Windows Automatic Recovery: " _No._ "

[uwu_peter]

12:08
Automatic repair usually only repairs Disk corruptions, light-middle registry corruptions and BCD/MBR corruptions

[sounak]

The BGM change while "Did WSL lie to us" reminds me of Ace Attorney.

[drawdebono]

Actually, there's one other case you didnt include: creating a folder with three dots at the end of the name. This is actually possible within windows. I actually faced this problem by creating it out of lousyness. I had an mp4 file of the movie "The englishman who went up to a hill but came down a mountain" Now you could see why I was lousy to name the folder, and also, because I thought I could easily reach the 256 characters limitation for a folder path if the download of this file would have folders named the same inside the folder I created in my desktop, which just for the sake of counting, would be initially "C:\Users\edwar\Desktop" 22 characters without quotes. So I named my desktop folder "The Englishman..." exactly like that, with three dots at the end. Well, finally the movie was there, and when the time came, I wanted to move this folder with all its content to my multimedia files HDD. Well, I couldnt do it. My next guess was I simply reached that characters limit, so I tried to rename it. No luck, windows would not allow it. I was able to copy the content (not cutting or deleteing content was allowed either) and paste it in another folder in the desired HDD, which I just named "The Englishman 1995" . After I copied the content I decided to delete the original desktop located folder and its content, but windows didnt allow it. Tried again renaming the folder, again, undoable. Ok, shift + delete: no. Drag to recycle bin, no. Ok, time for extreme measures. CMD: rmdir: no; del: C:\Users\edwar\Desktop\The Englishman blah blah blah", no; rename folder, no. Actually, here it was where I realized what I did: I created a folder that was giving the DOS instruction to go to the previous folder of the string, so whenever I wrote "The englishman who went up..." after any given DOS command, I was ñtaken back to the desktop, no matter if I was using cmd prompt normally, with admin rights, powershell, or even directly from the windows 10 CD repair utility. At this point, I was only really to recover my space from C drive, because its a tiny little 128GB SSD, which dont like a 4GB mp4file in my desktop. Also I was worried this could became a problem afterwards. But if I was unable to delete this folder even from command prompt, what was I to do? Well, actually it was something a little weird I discovered by googling for an answer. Someone suggested to create a compressed RAR file with the program WINRAR, and selecting the option "Delete files after archiving", when creating it. Well I gave it a try... and it worked! Finally deleting the RAR file was no problem as it didnt had an ivalid name, so that was easy. This was the only way this folder was deleted from my desktop. Never thought about using a Linux distro, because I thought the three dots would also been an instruction in there, so I did not even give it a chance. Hope you mae it till here. Only something about a situation that wasnt covered by this video.

[TheWTFDubstep]

Windows: I can't handle it
Linux: sudo handle it

[Preinstallable]

The rare occasion when Automatic Repair fixes something.

[JayCeeCreates]

Me: creates "<corrupt" and ">corrupt" in the user folder
Windows: *now entering Incognito mode*

[Konym]

Honestly this channel is awesome. Learned more about Windows internals through this channel than through 4+ years of using Windows as a poweruser by myself.

[HSHamster]

Windows: It works
FlyTech: Something doesn't feel right

[mathias_mp]

Your videos are very, very interesting. It looks like I'm learning something new every 30 seconds (or less). Keep it up, good job!

[icedude_]

The more videos of yours I watch, the more I realise that windows internals are really, really, messy and barely hold together.

Also: why is it that Linux drivers can do these things to NTFS partitions and keep it readable, whereas the very operating system NTFS was designed to work well with can't? It's rediculous!