Sometimes you download files from the internet and they come with filenames that are not compatible with Windows operating system. If you use tools like Cygwin in Windows, then they may also end up creating files in Windows that have file names which are valid in Linux but are not allowed in Windows. Once these files are creating or copied in Windows, it becomes impossible to rename or delete them.
Using a small portable tool called DelinvFile, you can easily get rid of such files that have invalid filenames. These files could be files with very long filenames or files with invalid characters. In Windows, you cannot use characters such as \ / : * ? " < > | anywhere in the file names.
If you are using Windows 10, then you have to make some changes to Windows registry before you can use DelinvFile. This is because DelinvFile makes use of the short file names feature in Windows but Microsoft has disabled this feature in Windows 10. They offer a small tool called Reset83.exe which can be used for making all the necessary changes.
In the DelinvFile user interface, you can pick a drive and folder to look for the files with invalid names. There are options to display all the files or just the files with filename errors. It displays the problematic files with red color so you can easily spot them.
There is a scanning tool using which you can select a folder and scan it for all the files with disallowed filenames. In the results, it displays not only the files with erroneous filenames but also gives a brief description about what is wrong with these files. You can take one of the actions on these files – delete, rename, delete on boot or rename on boot etc.
DelinvFile is a handy utility to delete files in Windows that have invalid file names. It has many different ways of deleting these types of files – deleting them instantly or deleting them at next Windows boot. However, it allows only 3 operations for free and after which you have to pay for the license to keep continue using it.
You can download DelinvFile from http://www.purgeie.com/delinv/dldelinv.htm.