Illegal character in a file name
A client provided us with a sample audio recording for a job.
The files downloaded correctly and were available via Explorer.
1| Part 2.mp3
1| Part 3.mp3
and so on. So the “|” is an illegal character in the Windows 10 file structure and messed everything up.
When we waanted to copy the files over to another folder, we received the following error message:
So since this is german, I will translate:
“The filename is invalid or too long”
This also happened with simple renaming of the files.
Trial and error
I searched through many forums, but it seems that Windows won’t allow such a state.
I tried to pack the files with WinZip and change the filenames within the archive, but also Winzip did not let me do that.
Then I tried with WinRar, no succes, since the files always showed as invalid
Tag&Rename 3.6.5 would not read and process the illegal filenames.
The next candidate was the use of Rename Master v3.13. It did read the filenames, did preview the proper changes, but did not change the wrong and illegal characters.
Flexible Renamer 8.4 was also not successful.
Also RenameFiles ver.2.3b did not help to acheive the goal.
We tested a few other software tools that were windows based, but since the files were on a local NAS, this was also not very successful, since some tools could not even connect to the NAS via the Network.
So the brute-force of UBCD (Ultimate Boot CD) was used.
But also PartedMagic was not easy to connect with the NAS, so the final solution was to turn to the file Manager of the NAS, since that works with Linux under the hood.
The solution
Our NAS was a QNAP and the only thing we had to achieve, was to release the security of the folder to guest status and – voilà the files could be easily changed.
