Solved Cannot remove a folder that ends with a "." (Unspecified error 0x80004005)

antspants · Saturday at 7:55 AM

Open PowerShell as admin
Paste this and press Enter (but check that I have the correct foldername.)

Remove-Item -LiteralPath "\\?\F:\Program Files\Downloads\[Hiramaru Shobou (Hiramaru Akira)] Majime de Uchiki na Uchida-san no Onanie o Mada Daremo Miteinai.." -Force -Recurse

kelper · Saturday at 7:56 AM

rmdir "\\?\F:\Program Files\Downloads\Folder Name" won't work.

rmdir "\\?\F:\Program Files\Downloads\Folder Name." will work.

But you must use the ACTUAL name of the folder INCLUDING the dot

So try

rmdir "\\?\F:\Program Files\Downloads\[Hiramaru Shobou (Hiramaru Akira)] Majime de Uchiki na Uchida-san no Onanie o Mada Daremo Miteinai."

batman44 · Saturday at 8:00 AM

antspants said:
Open PowerShell as admin
Paste this and press Enter (but check that I have the correct foldername.)

Remove-Item -LiteralPath "\\?\F:\Program Files\Downloads\[Hiramaru Shobou (Hiramaru Akira)] Majime de Uchiki na Uchida-san no Onanie o Mada Daremo Miteinai.." -Force -Recurse

Copy that into windows power shell as an admin and press enter right?
it didn't worked

kelper said:
rmdir "\\?\F:\Program Files\Downloads\Folder Name" won't work.

rmdir "\\?\F:\Program Files\Downloads\Folder Name." will work.

But you must use the ACTUAL name of the folder INCLUDING the dot

Going to the folder, and then using dir /x
showed the same folder name as what I've copied pasted,

Using rmdir "\\?\F:\Program Files\Downloads\Folder Name." posted me
"The directory is not empty."

kelper · Saturday at 8:05 AM

rmdir "\\?\F:\Program Files\Downloads\[Hiramaru Shobou (Hiramaru Akira)] Majime de Uchiki na Uchida-san no Onanie o Mada Daremo Miteinai."

antspants · Saturday at 8:06 AM

egozi44 said:
Copy that into windows power shell as an admin and press enter right?
it didn't worked

I apologise, I added an extra dot at the end

Corrected

Remove-Item -LiteralPath "\\?\F:\Program Files\Downloads\[Hiramaru Shobou (Hiramaru Akira)] Majime de Uchiki na Uchida-san no Onanie o Mada Daremo Miteinai." -Force -Recurse

antspants · Saturday at 8:10 AM

You should probably make sure that the actual foldername really has a dot at the end

PowrShell as admin again
Get-ChildItem -LiteralPath "\\?\F:\Program Files\Downloads"

Read the folder contents, find the folder and make sure it ends with a “.”

batman44 · Saturday at 8:12 AM

kelper said:
rmdir "\\?\F:\Program Files\Downloads\[Hiramaru Shobou (Hiramaru Akira)] Majime de Uchiki na Uchida-san no Onanie o Mada Daremo Miteinai."

Sadly it didn't worked, it printed
"The directory is not empty." again (as I've mentioned above ;/)

Buttt

antspants said:
I apologise, I added an extra dot at the end

Corrected

Remove-Item -LiteralPath "\\?\F:\Program Files\Downloads\[Hiramaru Shobou (Hiramaru Akira)] Majime de Uchiki na Uchida-san no Onanie o Mada Daremo Miteinai." -Force -Recurse

Holy... that works, thanks a lot! (I've noriced the two dots btw but thought it was on purpose)
I've seen some people mentioning there that Powershell can bypass that but I had no idea how to write the command, and seeing how the CMD stuff and tools didn't worked start make me lose hope :0

I wonder if playing more with the CMD would've solved it too... just so I know for next time,
But thankfully this specific issue is solved and I can probably just copy paste the command from here and edit for other directories in the future

kelper · Saturday at 8:13 AM

DIR /X will show the short file name. For my test file foldername. the short name is folder~1

I can delete it with DEL folder~1

antspants · Saturday at 8:13 AM

egozi44 said:
Holy... that works, thanks a lot!

Yeah sorry about the extra dot at the end of the first one

antspants · Saturday at 8:14 AM

egozi44 said:
and I can probably just copy paste the command from here and edit for other directories in the future

Yes. And in your notes, remember “Powershell as Admin”

kelper · Saturday at 8:21 AM

Because the folder was not empty, I should have included the /S like this

rmdir /S "\\?\F:\Program Files\Downloads\[Hiramaru Shobou (Hiramaru Akira)] Majime de Uchiki na Uchida-san no Onanie o Mada Daremo Miteinai."

batman44 · Saturday at 8:26 AM

kelper said:
DIR /X will show the short file name. For my test file foldername. the short name is folder~1

I can delete it with DEL folder~1

I was actually in the middle of posting a pic of the DIR X so you can see it was the same name or tell me if there was some potentially extra spaces there near the end or something, but then I've seen antspants comment and it worked so I've stopped the post there

kelper said:
Because the folder was not empty, I should have included the /S like this

rmdir /S "\\?\F:\Program Files\Downloads\[Hiramaru Shobou (Hiramaru Akira)] Majime de Uchiki na Uchida-san no Onanie o Mada Daremo Miteinai."

Umm so the S is matter when you have files in a folder?
Will memo it for next time thx!

I did tried
rmdir /q /s my file name
before, but it didn't had the whole "\\?\ parts which confused me without some example

antspants · Saturday at 8:47 AM

egozi44 said:
but it didn't had the whole "\\?\ parts which confused me without some example

“\\” is better handled by Powershell

kelper · Saturday at 8:58 AM

antspants said:
“\\” is better handled by Powershell

Why do you think that? Just asking.

antspants · Saturday at 9:02 AM

kelper said:
Why do you think that? Just asking.

I’ve read it in here by a couple of GURU’s when code was posted. And after looking into it, all I could understand is that CMD does not support UNC paths as current directories. Which isn’t much of an understanding, more of a reason.

kelper · Saturday at 9:04 AM

I looked it up and \\?\ does not work with REN or MOVE, so you were quite right.

kelper · Saturday at 9:18 AM

Just for info, I created a folder called TEST and added some files to it. Then I used

Rename-Item -LiteralPath '\\?\C:\Users\marti\Desktop\test' -NewName 'test.'

to rename the folder TEST to TEST.

Then I used this in a command prompt

rmdir /s "\\?\C:\Users\marti\Desktop\TEST."

and it removed the folder AND its contents.

batman44 · Saturday at 5:20 PM

I'm honestly surprised that consider how this issue seem to pretty much an ancient one (though not that common I'll admit),
It's still hard to solve with an internet search, solely due to how most people will give the solution for removing a file or empty folder at best, over a folder that is filled with content inside,

The links I've sent were the only ones I could find after looking around for a while on a few search engines and YT, and even they don't give you a straight solution that non-programmers could use with a few edits and copy-paste.

I feel like it should be more known by now... yet I could say it about many things in life from experience xD.

antspants · Saturday at 5:52 PM

egozi44 said:
I'm honestly surprised that consider how this issue seem to pretty much an ancient one (though not that common I'll admit),

Apparently it’s always been that Windows (any Windows using the NTFS file system) doesn’t like a file or folder name ending with a period “.” due to long-standing compatibility and design rules in Windows file system APIs. And if you manage to create one (in your case it was created by software? IDM or something?”)
One way to delete it is by using that command I gave you:

(Powershell as admin)

Remove-Item -LiteralPath "\\?\F:\Program Files\Downloads\[FolderName." -Force -Recurse

Winuser · Saturday at 6:49 PM

antspants said:
Apparently it’s always been that Windows (any Windows using the NTFS file system) doesn’t like a file or folder name ending with a period “.” due to long-standing compatibility and design rules in Windows file system APIs.

If they can stop certain characters from being used when naming a file makes me wonder why they can't do it when naming a folder.

Solved Cannot remove a folder that ends with a "." (Unspecified error 0x80004005)

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