Back in the old DOS days, occasionally some luser would create a file with a space in its filename:
Volume in drive C is HARD DRIVE
Volume Serial Number is 365B-16F1
Directory of C:\
AUTOEXEC BAT 818 12-25-00 12:00a
CONFIG SYS 395 10-31-88 11:59p
COMMAND COM 2,198 03-21-93 10:01p
IO SYS 3,296 05-16-29 5:23p
MSDOS SYS 1,958 06-15-92 3:25a
BAD FILE TXT 35 13-37-82 6:66a
8 file(s) 8,039 bytes
0 dir(s) 352.90 MB free
The horror, the horror! It can't be deleted normally, for "del bad file.txt" would only look for the file "bad"! The only hope would be to use COMMAND.COM's little-known quoting feature:
del "bad file.txt"
With the invention of Windows 95 and its long filenames, having spaces in them became normal and didn't require hours of rooting through the manual to find out how to delete.
nosfentor informed me that del bad?file.txt would also work. However that would also delete files with names like badjfile.txt.
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