Over the past few days I’ve been writing a program to create static HTML pages from Wikipedia XML dumps (long story – actual program and more info to come in a few more days…)
The program creates a lot of subdirectories in the process, and a lot of these happen to be in Unicode.
99.9% of the time this is fine. Windows is happy. I’m happy. Everybody’s happy. The 0.1% has been a particular folder ‘Cuisine of Israel’ which, for the past day, I’ve been unable to delete. IÂ get the following message:
Cannot delete Cuisine of Israel : Cannot find the specified file.
Make sure you specify the correct path and file name.
It took some searching on Google, and this Groups page for me to find the answer:
- Open a command line (Start > Run > Type cmd and press Enter)
- Navigate to the folder above the one you want to delete
- Type dir /x to see the MS-DOS 8.3 filenames. In my case it was CUISIN~1
- Type (eg. for me:) rmdir /s CUISIN~1 and confirm the delete.
- The folder should now be removed.
It should be a similar process for files (except, using del instead of rmdir).
Apparently Windows has a problem with certain characters. In this case I think there was a Unicode space character of some kind in the file. Windows wasn’t capable of dealing with it, and gave the error message.
Make sure you’re deleting the right directory. This solution provided without warranty – please back up your files, etc. etc. Use at your own risk.