Admin
Thanks for clearing that up, I was wondering what happened.. No need to worry about it.
I hope there's a special place in you-know-where for spammers, they ruin so many thing for the rest of us.
I'll just be extra careful with the posting, I can be quite fumble-fingered at times.
Btw, I've been doing some research into this API-thing, and luckily I was wrong!!
It turns out that you can mod an APIs behavior, in how it treats FullPathNames passed to it.
There's a \\?\ namespace-prefix, 1st suggested by therube: http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/foru ... =15#p12950
This prefix 'tells' an API not to place so many restrictions against the name that follows.
I've confirmed this prefix is also what allows \\?\VeryLongFullPathNames and \\?\UNC-Paths.
Not all API's will accept the prefix, but I'm told that all Unicode-versions do accept it.
Only thing I have not verified - Does this prefix also allow accessing files with the illegals??
At this point, I'm gonna say there's a 90% chance it does, based on the apps I've been testing.
There's a decent link at: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/naming-a-file
Who knows, maybe not such a hard re-write after all ??
Just guessing on that part, only 'programming' I ever did was with an old Casio calculator.
Anywho, I'm glad to have learned all this stuff.. Maybe others will find it interesting too.
Cheers!