Rather than finangling with BASIC, I'd suggest you do this using one of the excellent Perl packages: http://www.perl.com/CPAN-local/ports/index.html#win32 Having obtained that, you can either zap the offending file with a quick one-liner, or you can delve as deep as you want within the OS with an adequate script. The language, per se, has no restrictions regarding the characters of the filename, the size, etc., other than those imposed by the underlying filesystem, since you'll be running under the Perl interpreter (instead of COMMAND.COM et.al.). Plus you'll have the bonus of getting an excellent administration platform, supported on virtually any operating system. JMC $x=25;print substr(',rekcah lreP rehtona tsuJ',$x,1) while --$x >= 0 Craig Boston wrote: > > Tested this both locally and over a network and the wildcard idea was able to > get rid of the files ending with a dot. For the sake of being cautions, > "filename?" seems to be able to handle it as well without resorting to * > > Win2k doesn't come with BASIC, so I snagged a copy of qbasic off one of the > NT4 machines. It doesn't seem to understand long file names so I wasn't able > to do anything useful with it. > > It seems these files (and possibly other files that the shell refuses to deal > with) can also be deleted by doing a DIR /X and deleting the DOS 8.3 name > directly. Surprisingly, this seems to work on remote systems over the network > as well. > > The shell should probably still be fixed as there are lots of clueless newbie > NT admins who don't know how to use the command-line... Of course they > probably have bigger security problems anyway. > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Meritt James" <meritt_jamesat_private> > > I''ve zapped files with names containing illegal characters by using > wildcard that expanded to the particular file... > > James Robbins wrote: > > > > I ran into a situation (quite a while back) where I had a file on a > > DOS machine that had illegal characters in it. I couldn't rename > > or delete it. I finally got rid of it by going into Basic and deleting > > it from there. Since Basic requires the file name to be in quotes > > it accepted it and deleted the file. > >
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