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It's possible to get a file into a windows filesystem whose name contains "*" or ":" characters. Windows reacts quite poorly when it find those in file names; b
by h2odragon 3y ago
It's possible to get a file into a windows filesystem whose name contains "*" or ":" characters. Windows reacts quite poorly when it find those in file names; but only in certain APIs, others pass them without concern. Makes for fun explosions.
The "260 character limit" is a good one; mostly seen that one in "I can do anything to this file but delete it!" complaints.
- quickthrower2 3y agoI had the can’t delete a file problem the other day. Got around it my moving it’s parent folder to a less nested location
- huhtenberg 3y agoIt's also possible to create files whose names start (or contain) a NUL character. Doing so will trigger every single antivirus, but it's doable nonetheless and messes a lot of things very thoroughly.
- Someone1234 3y agoAlso, possible in the Windows Registry, which no normal UI tools (inc. Reg Edit) could remove.
- 13of40 3y agoA similar quirk of the registry API is that it has a simplified set of methods that don't specify the data type of the value, so you can have an application that expects to read a null terminated string value, but substitute a binary value with no null termination. If the app doesn't handle that right, it's buffer overrun time. Usually that's foot-shooting, but sometimes you can do that in HKCU as a low privileged user to a value that gets read by a higher privileged process and causes it to "misbehave".
- ale42 3y agoYou can also create a file (or even better a folder) named CON or COM4. Good luck doing anything with it using the Explorer. (15 years ago I've seen some malware using that to make removal difficult)
- dark-star 3y agoyou can also get "files into a Linux filesystem" that contain the "/" character, which also leads to fantastic kernel crashes... Admittedly, it's (probably) harder to pull off than on Windows, but still...