Deleting Undeletable FilesThe Windows NTFS file system allows the creation of paths and filenames which are very long and contain exotic characters beyond the usual ASCII character set (a, b, c, 1, 2, 3, etc). However, most of the utilities in Windows, such as Windows Explorer, and the DEL and ATTRIB commands, cannot deal with such long paths and/or characters because they filter the filenames before passing to the file system API. This means that it is possible to create files which cannot be removed, or dealt with in any other way. Another cause of undeletable files are those with a space at the end of the filename. (When deleting a folder, if a file or folder contained in folder that has a space at the end of the name, the operation will silently quit.) Using Robocopy To Remove Unwieldy FilenamesRobocopy, unlike many of the inbuilt commands, supports much longer paths.
Using Short Names To Remove Problematic FilesIf you've identified a file or folder with a problematic filename, or one which has a space at the end:
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