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.
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.
@@garrettv.g.1758 I only know that F-Zero's a racing game and that Nintendo basically killed it by not releasing any more games. Kid Icarus is in a similar predicament.
Actually, you can edit some regedit, and windows will also be, but so many programs dont account for that, like msvc compiler, so you wont probably break windows, but a lot of other lazy programs
Also, since Automatic Repair is part of Windows RE which is on a separate partition, it still can run, except if you corrupt the Windows RE Partition, because then you are totally screwed.
one time while attempting to grow the /home partition for my (then) kubuntu install i somehow managed to format my entire hard drive instead which was pretty epic and cool imo
@@jadesanford2857 Yeah, In my times I acidently deleted my EFI partition and corrupted the Windows RE partition by replacing files inside the winre.wim file on the partition.
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.
One time i created a ... folder through new folder option. And it did nothing. Also it was on my main PC. I could just delete it. I didnt have to do like rmdir \q \\?\C:\Users\????? ??????\Desktop\... in cmd Explorer just behaved as if it was just a normal file name. The filename WAS NOT DOTS AND WASNT F046 F046 F046. It just worked for no reason. I was quite scared because I had watched FlyTechs video but... Was it false?? I was on windows and you probably know that,
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.
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!
Just for clarification: Unix systems (including Linux and BSD) technically speaking CAN use names with “/“ and NUL. The limitation isn’t on the side of the system(unlike on windows) but the file system (ext[2-4] doesn’t allow those characters.). So if you use a nonstandard file system allowing for “/“ and NUL in names, Linux can handle it while windows won’t be able to handle filenames of any FS if they include the forbidden characters.
While i understand how '/' would work, how would NUL character in filenames work with any of the syscalls? Don't all of them, like open(2) expect a null terminated string for a filename?
9:45 Regarding the unusual behavior of < and > in filenames, here’s another oddity to consider. A viewer of my last video commented that < and > can actually be used as wildcard substitutions for filenames, provided they are escaped inside double quotes to prevent them from being interpreted in the usual way as redirectors. I personally verified it to work even on older versions of NT and have no idea why cmd.exe would interpret < or > as ? or * though. Could these phenomena be linked in some way?
I have no idea whatsoever. What I know is that these characters are forbidden by NTFS and not necessarily Windows. Thus, all explanations with shells (like wildcards or redirects) seem unsatisfactory...well, except if these limitations were imposed because of Windows in the first place. I don't know.
The illegal filenames actually caused problems for me when I was trying to copy save files from a PlayStation 1 memory card, using uLaunchELF on a PlayStation 2, to a flash drive, so that I could use these saves with an emulator. PS1 save files actually have filenames (not to be confused with save file labels you see on the memory card browser), but you never actually see them, they are only visible to the game. Well, some clever programmers figured out they can get a few extra bytes of save space, without just using more blocks, by embedding some data into the filename. This means that some game saves use filenames that are perfectly fine on a playstation, but can cause problems if accessed from a Windows computer. The solution would be to rename the file with a PlayStation 2 first, before copying to a flash drive, and then put the raw save file into a memory card file using software such as memcardrex and then within the software itself, rename it to what it was before so the game actually loads the save file after loading that memory card file onto the emulator.
Interesting fact: When deleting any HTML file, Windows search for a folder named with the same name as HTML, but ending in _files so, deleting "x.html" file will delete "x_files" folder also And, deleting "x_files" folder will delete "x.html" file
If you are programmer might you will understand why windows behaves like that.. I think FindFirst and FindNext APIs will fail in the presence of those characters..
There's some interesting things going on with WSL. If you download something that Windows wants to protect you from - like a PDF or something else that needs "unblocking", and drag it into your \\wsl$ network drive, WSL creates a file called :Zone.Identifier. That file is completely invisible to Windows.
y'know, ive always had a weird obsession with computers. when i was little, they always intrigued me. they always made me ask questions. i still love computers, and flytech, you were one of the first computer youtubers i ever watched. thank you for answering the questions ive had since i was a child.
I once made a few print screens on Ubuntu and copyied them on my windows desktop But I failed to realize that the images had the date with / in their name. Windows refused to open them. Or to rename them. It was interesting. Edit: this was some time ago so some details are a bit vague. As fly mentioned / are not permitted in filenames on linux, I don't remember what the separator for date was used, but now that I remember things a little better, I think the problem was the character I used to separate the time (hh:mm:ss), but I don't remember what it was. Anyway, I couldn't use those images until I renamed them in ubuntu, but at first I was confused why windows was basically ignoring their existence. (they also had no thumbnail, not sure I spelled that right)
@@FlyTechVideos Sorry, my memory failed me. It was some time ago, I don't remember exactly what the illegal character was, but I remember it was something to do with the date or time
There was a bug on my old USB stick where Onedrive would add a Documents and a Shared Documents folder twice, both in the same directory listing. I checked Properties in case any characters slipped through, but no! Duplicated folders with the same name and I could open both by all means in Explorer. Weird.
I remember when installing GTA Vice city the shortcut would be named Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Windows went completely batshit while trying to delete it
Watching your videos give me tons of ideas of things to do on school computers. Zipbomb on a usb stick, Illegal names, . folder, "secret folders" (toolbars GUIDs) Hiding stuff in folders... etc
I used linux to name a folder "con" wich, for Windows is very illegal, cuz its for a Driver, and... I cant even copy it off of the usb... I cant open it, i canr copy it, its weird
3:00 An old trick to deal with filesystem objects with illegal characters in their names was to use wildcards, for example to "fix" a file called "foo*bar.txt" you could run "ren f* a" (or something similar). It may or may not work in different circumstances and different versions of Windows, but it's a quick and easy option to try before resorting to something more complex.
I think it will try to make a compressed folder of C: Which will make 7z, or WinRAR, or whatever program you're using to ran out of memory, space in temp, or crash do to recursion.
as someone who uses Command line for executing and doing alot of complex stuff, characters > and < are used for reading and writting to files and they are interrupts. The fact that windows is able to handle them without completely destroying itself is impressive
At the beginning when you started to mess with NTFS from Linux, I asked myself which of your modifications would actually survive a chkdsk. Seems that you resolved this question at the end - none of them... (Adding also corrupted filenames on the recovery partition next to WinRE.Wim would probably have prevented chkdsk from "fixing" this issue...) Also, I am not sure why you are surprised that folders in WSL can be accessed by more than one name. Every file/folder within drvfs that contains at least one letter can be accessed by two names, and if it contains e.g. five letters, it can be accessed by 32 names...
I don't quite get your last point, what do you mean "accessed by multiple names"? If a folder is called "folder" then the only way to access it is to actually access "folder", or are you talking about something else?
@@FlyTechVideos When accessing a file in DrvFS from WSL, it is accessed as if the filesystem was case insensitive. So a file called "folder" can also be accessed as "foLdeR" etc. This difference between U+0041 (A) and U+0061 (a) may seem "smaller" than the difference between U+F022 and U+0022 (as we as humans are used to not distinguising between upper and lower case letters) , but from the point of WSL it is exactly the same.
Okay, but I was never wondering about case sensitivity. Being case insensitive surely is a thing that has to be implemented extra because for a computer, that's 2 random different bytes. I don't think there is any special handling for 22 and F022, especially because trying to access the folder with 22 didn't work at all fron WSL...
i wonder if you went to the REAL C:\ and run the tree command would it basicle loop the command because there is a C:\ on the desktop and because when you open it it takes you to C:\?
Writing "o?" works, because '?' is special character for "single character", like '*' is for "multiple characters". It worked becasue you had exactly one directory called "o". If you create two, the '?' will be consufed and try to load 2 directories into command line (at least that's how it would work in bash) - what actually happened later in the video ;)
You can easily make any illegal folder by using Cordova without administrator permissions and In command prompt. All you have to do is open command prompt and install cordova by this command: npm install cordova -g and let it install. Then after installation all you have to do is write cordova create (any illegal name and not in brackets) in command prompt. And you will have an unempty illegal folder. PS I don't know how to delete it.
I'd imagine that setting the folder name to a drive name is a HUGE source of directory traversal vulnerabilities, since it seems like a pretty obscure discovery. That's something Windows might want to look into handling better, or at least document so that developers know that it can happen.
Interestingly enough, Windows XP is not affected by the "Folder" thing. Windows XP still boots into the desktop, even with "" folder added to the root C:\ partition.
In Linux only / is forbidden in folder names as it's the path separator, all Unicode characters are allowed, except /. I don't know exactly why Window$ blocks so many characters, but the colon is for accessing "Alternate Data Streams" for files on NTFS, which are for example used to tell Windoe$ a file is from the internet.
If you will see these folders in the automatic repair if you click on the button on the desktop and automatic repair, it will actually change the directory to Drive called “Boot (X:)”
Basically, it's the key to godlike powers that no file must access. It grants inmortality and two of them together can block the system to keep the user out of their zone forever
SO if you go to registry editor and choose where all of the file types are configured, you can see a very Long file type, so copy that and make a file with that file type name it is a Explorer file, which has a white Icon of the windows Explorer and the app is called "Windows Explorer"
5:35 so if u had permissions and the drive wounldn´t be in use, and it would start deleting the whole directory, and then it comes to the point were it would be deleting the files on the desktop, what would happen?
Using C: as file names might actually be used in hacks. Imagine a program only let you create and open file in your restricted path but the name cause windows to instead search in the Root directory 🧐
I wonder what would've happened if you were to put those folders inside of System32. Would Windows still give you a BSoD or would you get thrown to the DOS?
All of illegal naming restrictions may suspect to be some what related in Windows Registry functions as file, which is also CLSID in Recycle BIN as {clsid}. < > is also registry Archives which could almost be create as files or text.reg.
Damn I wish we would know what happens when you make a folder that has multiple \ in it. Like folder\folder. How would windows react? Or doing this with existing folders, putting a file caller users\fly inside the C drive, would be interesting to see how windows reacts to that.
Windows in itself is just secure enough to avoid such small issues. If other software is used as dual boot with windows to affect windows then that could do even more worse.
Windows: I like when users are calm and doesn't mess with me
Fly and Enderman: Let us introduce ourselves...
69th like
nice
Ok
96th like
lol
Fly and enderman be one person😂
@@leap123_ WHY ARE YOU EVERYWHERE?!
Legend has it that Automatic Repair actually repaired something. Oh wait... It turns out that's true
@@powewq1748 you stole my profile pic
Phager Xfostos Google gave you two the same letter and color.
In fact, it repaired filesystem error on C:\
You don't know how to be funny
It never tells you what it actually did though. No details at all. What if you didn't know caused the problem.
NTFS: I fear no men
But this thing
It scares me
corrupt
69th like
nice
@YICHEN XIONG The one time Automatic Repair actually did something
Fellow tf2 player?
The Automatic Repair Finally does his jobs!
¡¿√√∆¶xfjhvxfb L,negvij
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.
Oh, TIL. Thanks!
@@FlyTechVideos Hi
@@FlyTechVideos are you responding those days in 2022? i just need a respond of you to check if you are active or no
@@saft2529 yes i am not dead, i am planning new videos
@@FlyTechVideos oh ok
Windows: you cant use disallowed filenames in ntfs with ME!
FlyTech: i know but he can
*points to flytech*
Accurate.
@@malwaretestingfan yes
When the fly notices you
APFS rules!
but *I* can*
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.
Fly: "I'm going to break Windows"
Windows Automatic Recovery: " _No._ "
I wanna like but not destroy those 69 likes
Enderman:"Lets mess with Windows 10"
Windows Automatic Recovery:"Don't "CTAC" With me..."
@ClassyUtra windows ctac xD
@ClassyUtra lmao
@@tee.enderxity ctac is a horrible misspell of "cat". also, windows ctac is kinda funny for me
"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!?
F-Zero's really fun; for a while it was better than Mario Kart until Double Dash came out.
@@garrettv.g.1758 I only know that F-Zero's a racing game and that Nintendo basically killed it by not releasing any more games. Kid Icarus is in a similar predicament.
F-Zero franchise: yep
F-zero, best SNES game :D
@@mrpiese1295 Personally, I prefer Kirby Super Star.
NTFS is case sensitive but Windows is not
Im intrested how this could break
yes
Good video idea!
Actually, you can edit some regedit, and windows will also be, but so many programs dont account for that, like msvc compiler, so you wont probably break windows, but a lot of other lazy programs
@@honzapat isn't registry case insensitive?
@@bamberghh1691 Key names are case insensitive, don't know about values.
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.
Automatic repair only repairs disk, registry and bcd/mbr corruptions
it can fix many issues, acctualy problem is very common for you to have a issue it can't do anything.
automatic repair also fixes issues like:missing kernel, boot loader and so on
@@bloonsfamily2066 that's nice
@@VDani16 and also a corrupted c: drive
12:08
Automatic repair usually only repairs Disk corruptions, light-middle registry corruptions and BCD/MBR corruptions
Also, since Automatic Repair is part of Windows RE which is on a separate partition, it still can run, except if you corrupt the Windows RE Partition, because then you are totally screwed.
if youve never accidentally deleted your windows re partition can you even call yourself good at computers
Jade Sanford I've purposefully deleted it before. I currently keep it because I have learned that it is actually important.
one time while attempting to grow the /home partition for my (then) kubuntu install i somehow managed to format my entire hard drive instead which was pretty epic and cool imo
@@jadesanford2857 Yeah, In my times I acidently deleted my EFI partition and corrupted the Windows RE partition by replacing files inside the winre.wim file on the partition.
Windows: I can't handle it
Linux: sudo handle it
😂
Lolll
it's su handle it
super user do handle it doesn't make sense.
Lol
@@Canadian789119 su isn't a command
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.
I've never seen someone confuse "lazy" with "lousy".
lol
It would have worked if u used unc patchs in the rmdir (or rd) command. Just like that: rd "\\?\C:\Users\Loldontknow\Desktop\The englishman..." /s /q
One time i created a ... folder through new folder option.
And it did nothing.
Also it was on my main PC.
I could just delete it.
I didnt have to do like
rmdir \q \\?\C:\Users\????? ??????\Desktop\... in cmd
Explorer just behaved as if it was just a normal file name.
The filename WAS NOT DOTS AND WASNT F046 F046 F046.
It just worked for no reason.
I was quite scared because I had watched FlyTechs video but...
Was it false??
I was on windows and you probably know that,
I aint readin allat
Me: creates "corrupt" in the user folder
Windows: *now entering Incognito mode*
me: creates "corrupt" in the C drive and the recovery mode drive
Windows: enjoy a dead pc
The BGM change while "Did WSL lie to us" reminds me of Ace Attorney.
Yeah, reminds me of a track from Apollo Justice, I think.
Windows: It works
FlyTech: Something doesn't feel right
The rare occasion when Automatic Repair fixes something.
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.
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!
They try to stop people like me from corrupting their OS
@@FlyTechVideos That's so funny! I don't know if you think it's not funny lol
Just for clarification:
Unix systems (including Linux and BSD) technically speaking CAN use names with “/“ and NUL. The limitation isn’t on the side of the system(unlike on windows) but the file system (ext[2-4] doesn’t allow those characters.). So if you use a nonstandard file system allowing for “/“ and NUL in names, Linux can handle it while windows won’t be able to handle filenames of any FS if they include the forbidden characters.
While i understand how '/' would work, how would NUL character in filenames work with any of the syscalls? Don't all of them, like open(2) expect a null terminated string for a filename?
again youtube notified me 16 minutes after the premiere end.
damn ... youtube, fix your stuff please
@@FlyTechVideos yes
I will explode the chat (Read my name)
@Legosploiter NoooOOoOOO
Same! :(
Your videos are very, very interesting. It looks like I'm learning something new every 30 seconds (or less). Keep it up, good job!
Thank you :3 I'm also learning a lot during making these videos. I didn't know about any of this 1 week ago
@@FlyTechVideos
Hi
9:45 Regarding the unusual behavior of < and > in filenames, here’s another oddity to consider. A viewer of my last video commented that < and > can actually be used as wildcard substitutions for filenames, provided they are escaped inside double quotes to prevent them from being interpreted in the usual way as redirectors. I personally verified it to work even on older versions of NT and have no idea why cmd.exe would interpret < or > as ? or * though.
Could these phenomena be linked in some way?
I have no idea whatsoever. What I know is that these characters are forbidden by NTFS and not necessarily Windows. Thus, all explanations with shells (like wildcards or redirects) seem unsatisfactory...well, except if these limitations were imposed because of Windows in the first place. I don't know.
Documentation: Undefined behaviour
FlyTech: It'd be rude if I didn't...
11:59 the whole NTFS FILE SYSTEM was the reason of BSoD
It's time to get whooooshed.
This is an error code which shows that there is an issue with the file system.
i mean kernels do it when you screw around with the file system even linux does it but rarely
Alluseri r/wooooooooosh
@@nsg650 Thankfully Linux's errors are usually more meaningful than “EXT4 FILE SYSTEM”.
i mean this all is because of the ntfs file system
wtf windows repair actually repairs?!
yes, Automatic repair only repairs disk, registry and bcd/mbr corruptions
Automatic repair is like 4 parallel universes ahead.
@@uwu_peter does that mean it will erase GRUB if I start it when dual-booting with Linux?
@@xyzzy-dv6te I think Automatic repair will just crash and stop working when it sees that you are using grub, since it doesn´t know what GRUB is.
@@uwu_peter I'll have to try that soon
Windows doesnt like them but NTFS doesnt care
This is so goddamn interesting
i love this channel
Your videos are so amazing man, youre my favourite youtuber
Love to hear that
FlyTech Videos :)
Nice Video about disallowed NTFS names
Thanks for watching!
@Jamesonverse *about a video about disallowed NTFS names
Now I'm going to boot a friend's PC from a live cd and put folder: on their desktop.
what if you put a «con» folder into the «» folders ? can Windows delete them ? :p
It behaves just like
@@FlyTechVideos what about just creating C:\con?
It's a weird unusable folder but you can create and remove it from within windows
@@FlyTechVideos try putting tha < and > in a different order, so >
@@chri-k windows would have a mental breakdown from all the abuse.
The illegal filenames actually caused problems for me when I was trying to copy save files from a PlayStation 1 memory card, using uLaunchELF on a PlayStation 2, to a flash drive, so that I could use these saves with an emulator. PS1 save files actually have filenames (not to be confused with save file labels you see on the memory card browser), but you never actually see them, they are only visible to the game. Well, some clever programmers figured out they can get a few extra bytes of save space, without just using more blocks, by embedding some data into the filename. This means that some game saves use filenames that are perfectly fine on a playstation, but can cause problems if accessed from a Windows computer. The solution would be to rename the file with a PlayStation 2 first, before copying to a flash drive, and then put the raw save file into a memory card file using software such as memcardrex and then within the software itself, rename it to what it was before so the game actually loads the save file after loading that memory card file onto the emulator.
3:10 most people: nice music
Me: tHaT's SuMmOnNiNg SaLt MuSiC
Oh yesssss
4:40 who else remembers going in a loop with mac's "volumes" folder
Yep
Interesting fact:
When deleting any HTML file, Windows search for a folder named with the same name as HTML, but ending in _files
so, deleting "x.html" file will delete "x_files" folder also
And, deleting "x_files" folder will delete "x.html" file
That's true?
I thought there was some mysterious link behind them
This is incredible, but now I'm wondering why windows is reacting like this, especially the last part
I had hoped the video would go into that!
If you are programmer might you will understand why windows behaves like that..
I think FindFirst and FindNext APIs will fail in the presence of those characters..
@@Sniperx102 yeah,I understand APIs as a small programmer.
@@Sniperx102 nope, those characters are preserved for the os for the search bar, location bar, values and more.
@@PabTSM-OfficialChannel You did not give any news to what ive said, BTW i am a programmer so i know what i am talking about.
There's some interesting things going on with WSL. If you download something that Windows wants to protect you from - like a PDF or something else that needs "unblocking", and drag it into your \\wsl$ network drive, WSL creates a file called :Zone.Identifier. That file is completely invisible to Windows.
Yup. Check out my "Alternative File streams" video, I explained it in detail there
y'know, ive always had a weird obsession with computers. when i was little, they always intrigued me. they always made me ask questions. i still love computers, and flytech, you were one of the first computer youtubers i ever watched. thank you for answering the questions ive had since i was a child.
I once made a few print screens on Ubuntu and copyied them on my windows desktop
But I failed to realize that the images had the date with / in their name. Windows refused to open them. Or to rename them. It was interesting.
Edit: this was some time ago so some details are a bit vague. As fly mentioned / are not permitted in filenames on linux, I don't remember what the separator for date was used, but now that I remember things a little better, I think the problem was the character I used to separate the time (hh:mm:ss), but I don't remember what it was.
Anyway, I couldn't use those images until I renamed them in ubuntu, but at first I was confused why windows was basically ignoring their existence. (they also had no thumbnail, not sure I spelled that right)
/ is illegal even on Linux, so that's weird
@@FlyTechVideos Sorry, my memory failed me. It was some time ago, I don't remember exactly what the illegal character was, but I remember it was something to do with the date or time
Fun fact: "\" folder behaves the similar way as "..."
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...
...
...
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Thank you for the tutorial to make Windows look like Linux with the drive folders! :D
help, i can't stop watching your videos.
Don't stop!! 💚
There was a bug on my old USB stick where Onedrive would add a Documents and a Shared Documents folder twice, both in the same directory listing. I checked Properties in case any characters slipped through, but no! Duplicated folders with the same name and I could open both by all means in Explorer. Weird.
FlyTech : *Uploads Video*
Me :
*Well it's time to learn something new!!*
I remember when installing GTA Vice city the shortcut would be named Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Windows went completely batshit while trying to delete it
Watching your videos give me tons of ideas of things to do on school computers.
Zipbomb on a usb stick,
Illegal names,
. folder,
"secret folders" (toolbars GUIDs)
Hiding stuff in folders... etc
Zipbomb is also known as "billion laughs."
I used linux to name a folder "con" wich, for Windows is very illegal, cuz its for a Driver, and... I cant even copy it off of the usb... I cant open it, i canr copy it, its weird
you dont even havr to use linux for that
@@ad2k17 yeah, but i have an old laptop that i installed ubuntu on, so, i dont need to mess around with any comand prompt.
Nomnom Groz The windowing server even runs on bash.
@@nomnomgroz8843 nah
in other words, bash ≠ cmd
Windows will *absolutely hate you* if you put folders with the same name but one has < the other has > (eg. Desktop)
3:00 An old trick to deal with filesystem objects with illegal characters in their names was to use wildcards, for example to "fix" a file called "foo*bar.txt" you could run "ren f* a" (or something similar). It may or may not work in different circumstances and different versions of Windows, but it's a quick and easy option to try before resorting to something more complex.
Now, what happens when you put the C:\ folders into a compressed folder?
I think it will try to make a compressed folder of C:
Which will make 7z, or WinRAR, or whatever program you're using to ran out of memory, space in temp, or crash do to recursion.
as someone who uses Command line for executing and doing alot of complex stuff, characters > and < are used for reading and writting to files and they are interrupts. The fact that windows is able to handle them without completely destroying itself is impressive
Well not really, as you can see. Linux, on the other hand, can do it without issues.
At the beginning when you started to mess with NTFS from Linux, I asked myself which of your modifications would actually survive a chkdsk. Seems that you resolved this question at the end - none of them... (Adding also corrupted filenames on the recovery partition next to WinRE.Wim would probably have prevented chkdsk from "fixing" this issue...)
Also, I am not sure why you are surprised that folders in WSL can be accessed by more than one name. Every file/folder within drvfs that contains at least one letter can be accessed by two names, and if it contains e.g. five letters, it can be accessed by 32 names...
I don't quite get your last point, what do you mean "accessed by multiple names"? If a folder is called "folder" then the only way to access it is to actually access "folder", or are you talking about something else?
@@FlyTechVideos When accessing a file in DrvFS from WSL, it is accessed as if the filesystem was case insensitive. So a file called "folder" can also be accessed as "foLdeR" etc. This difference between U+0041 (A) and U+0061 (a) may seem "smaller" than the difference between U+F022 and U+0022 (as we as humans are used to not distinguising between upper and lower case letters) , but from the point of WSL it is exactly the same.
Okay, but I was never wondering about case sensitivity. Being case insensitive surely is a thing that has to be implemented extra because for a computer, that's 2 random different bytes. I don't think there is any special handling for 22 and F022, especially because trying to access the folder with 22 didn't work at all fron WSL...
microsoft: *let's make it so that people using wsl can't create files with illegal file/folder names but trick them by showing a dot on the folder*
i wonder if you went to the REAL C:\ and run the tree command would it basicle loop the command because there is a C:\ on the desktop and because when you open it it takes you to C:\?
Yes, it would actually. I forgot to explore the recursiveness in more detail :/
Writing "o?" works, because '?' is special character for "single character", like '*' is for "multiple characters". It worked becasue you had exactly one directory called "o". If you create two, the '?' will be consufed and try to load 2 directories into command line (at least that's how it would work in bash) - what actually happened later in the video ;)
Ah, I see. Thank you!
Folder: and Folder*: why does everyone hate me
PartedMagic: I don’t hate you that much
fly: be prepared! windows will hate us
windows: i wasn't made for this goddamnit
I barely subscribe any channel because their content isn't worth of that but your channel provides informative content
Thanks and keep up with vids :)
Him: Erases "New Folder" for wrote "Folder"
Me: *HMMM LOOKS ORIGINAL*
You can easily make any illegal folder by using Cordova without administrator permissions and In command prompt. All you have to do is open command prompt and install cordova by this command: npm install cordova -g and let it install. Then after installation all you have to do is write cordova create (any illegal name and not in brackets) in command prompt. And you will have an unempty illegal folder.
PS I don't know how to delete it.
the old name:
Disallowed NTFS File Names vs. Windows
I can’t believe I saw this after this was published! Thanks Fly Tech!
It is interesting to see folders named with the disallowed characters, thank you for showing this, your videos are interesting!
I'd imagine that setting the folder name to a drive name is a HUGE source of directory traversal vulnerabilities, since it seems like a pretty obscure discovery. That's something Windows might want to look into handling better, or at least document so that developers know that it can happen.
Nah, I don't think so. It just acts as a symbolic link to C:
You still wouldn't be able to go to folders you don't have permissions to
*whatever they do, WSL refuses to acknowledge their existence*
mood
Interestingly enough, Windows XP is not affected by the "Folder" thing. Windows XP still boots into the desktop, even with "" folder added to the root C:\ partition.
C:/Windows/system32/del C:/Windows
If anyone’s wondering, the Unicode points U+F000~F07F are in the Private Use Area.
Private use characters can be used by fonts as anything you want, it just won't be assigned by Unicode
Out of curiosity, what happens if you run Winload.exe when windows is running, or what happen if you manage to run it in other OS / inside another VM?
"winload.exe cannot be run in Win32 mode"
What happens if you place
Probably BSOD
Automatic recovery actually fixed the problem. First time ever!
u put a lot of work into the videos!!!!!! i love this channel. በጣም በጣም በጣም በጣም እናመሰግናለን
In Linux only / is forbidden in folder names as it's the path separator, all Unicode characters are allowed, except /.
I don't know exactly why Window$ blocks so many characters, but the colon is for accessing "Alternate Data Streams" for files on NTFS, which are for example used to tell Windoe$ a file is from the internet.
null character is banned too
What if someone sends you an archive which contains some files with illegal characters in filenames and you try to open it?
it wont open
windows will refuse to open the archive's
or maybe it wont open and windows will struggle itself¿?
If you will see these folders in the automatic repair if you click on the button on the desktop and automatic repair, it will actually change the directory to Drive called “Boot (X:)”
Basically, it's the key to godlike powers that no file must access. It grants inmortality and two of them together can block the system to keep the user out of their zone forever
I try many of these tricks on my live Windows installation, and hopefully, I'll never mess up XD.
Don’t use those on a real pc. Use them in windows sandbox or vmware
SO if you go to registry editor and choose where all of the file types are configured, you can see a very Long file type, so copy that and make a file with that file type name it is a Explorer file, which has a white Icon of the windows Explorer and the app is called "Windows Explorer"
What would happen if you were to put the corrupted folders into a zip file, and then unzip it in windows?
I think it would not unzip, with a hex error maybe.
You create a black hole
You should have tried folder names like "NUL", "LPT" or "CON"
I think he already did in another video
@@uwu_peter That was Enderman i guess
That can be possible with CMD:
md .\con\
Anic17 But don't try it on your host, do it on a VM.
@@justsomerandompersononthei2595 no problem, I have tried it and no G
BSOD nor errors
5:35 so if u had permissions and the drive wounldn´t be in use, and it would start deleting the whole directory, and then it comes to the point were it would be deleting the files on the desktop, what would happen?
Why does windows react in such a way when using this characters? Is it something to do with ascii or Unicode?
If you make a folder for game save back ups in steam and use the folder naming feature there you can put slashes in the names
Finally, Automatic repair actually works! Good Microsoft! Something which you have succeeded.
Using C: as file names might actually be used in hacks. Imagine a program only let you create and open file in your restricted path but the name cause windows to instead search in the Root directory 🧐
Soo basically a sandbox escape? Would be _really_ easy to fix though, just disallow any path with "C:" in it.
On my Windows 10 if I create those folders on Terminal, they appear with a middle dot, instead of the characters that I chose.
using "?" in powershell is the same as using it in windows explorer, it replaces a single character (a wildcard for 1char) :)
Ah, TIL. Thanks!
Messing with windows is always funny. I love your videos
finally there a indestructable folder in Windows
When I have first seen the PartedMagic logo, I thought it said R-Rated Magic.
I saw FartedMagic.
@@FunkyFurret LMAOOOOOO
@@FunkyFurret
XD
Ur pc crashed bc it died from laughter
what if we hide a test virus in the 'folder' folder? will AV software be able to detect and remove it
You get rid of stuff right
Do you
@@taylorscates8015 oh yes
I wonder what would've happened if you were to put those folders inside of System32. Would Windows still give you a BSoD or would you get thrown to the DOS?
Sorry that I'm late, but Windows NT isn't even HAVE DOS.
All of illegal naming restrictions may suspect to be some what related in Windows Registry functions as file, which is also CLSID in Recycle BIN as {clsid}. < > is also registry Archives which could almost be create as files or text.reg.
2:24 “Properties seem... Mostly sane”
"This doesn't feel right..."
are you trying to trigger my sensitive memes
My mom will find a 1TB of "Study" folder that is corrupted and unreadable in the next few days on my computer
Damn I wish we would know what happens when you make a folder that has multiple \ in it.
Like folder\folder. How would windows react? Or doing this with existing folders, putting a file caller users\fly inside the C drive, would be interesting to see how windows reacts to that.
What I did not expect is that chkdsk will remove any illegal named folders as well as files
Did the WSL lie to us?
Me: **Wears sunglasses**
T h e M a t r i x
Windows in itself is just secure enough to avoid such small issues. If other software is used as dual boot with windows to affect windows then that could do even more worse.