A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, Windows always ran on DOS.  Furthermore, file names longer than 8 characters with a 3 character extension were not allowed.  Nor were files that ended in a space.

When Microsoft decided to extend the file name length to more than 8.3 characters, they made the latter backwards-compatible with the former dos ways.  Therefore, a file name like

“My Pictures”

was interpreted in 8.3 format as

“MYPICT~1″

Normally, this feature is never used, because modern day Windows programs use long file names with spaces and other symbols with no problem.  But today, I found an anomaly, a directory of my friend’s pictures that was created (in Unix) with a space at the end, and Windows simply refused to delete it. All the history of Windows and DOS came rushing back to me in one sweet moment.

I tried all the classic ways to do it.  Command line, reboot, try to rename the directory before deleting it.  The problem was, Windows could tell that the file had a space at the end.  I would type ‘del Mich<tab>’ and Windows would fill in the rest of the prompt to say ‘del “Michelle “.’  But I couldn’t delete it until I stumbled across a simple solution:

First, use “DIR /X” to find the 8.3 filename.  Then use del to delete that simple 8.3 name.

Simple, yet profoundly historic.  Much as Microsoft has tried to hide DOS and render it irrelevant in Windows XP, it still shows its roots now and then.