How to delete files that start with illegal characters from the Comman

[Rez.]

Hi.

I'm currently dual booting Windows XP Pro and OS X Leopard on my system. I recently installed Paragon NTFS to gain write access to my NTFS partitions. All is well so far with the exception of one annoying problem. Every OS X session leaves behind some files on my NTFS partitions (.Trashes, ._.Trashes ..etc) This happens everytime I boot back into XP from OS X. I can delete these junk folders and files from Explorer without incident so I thought I would write up a little Batch Script to do it for me at Startup.

Given it's unix nature, The OS X files all start with what XP would consider illegal characters namely periods. I can delete the offending folders from the commandline without any problems but the files always come back with a "File not found" error. I've searched around and can't seem to find out why this is. I also cannot rename or move the offending files from the commandline.

Here's what I mean in way of an example:

@echo off
title Cleaning up OS X junk files

echo.

echo Cleaning up OS X junk files ...

RD /Q /S %SYSTEMDRIVE%\.Trashes

REM The Removal of the Folder named .Trashes is successful

del /Q %SYSTEMDRIVE%\._.Trashes

REM Comes back with an error telling me it cannot find the file specified
REM The MOVE and RENAME commands give the same message

Note that I can delete all files and folder starting with illegal characters from Explorer.

Any help would be appreciated - Thanks.

[Mijzelf]

Not sure if it works for your periods, but generally you can delete files with illegal characters by applying a '?' wildcard. So deleting ._.Trashes should be done by 'del ?_.Trashes', or maybe 'del .\?_.Trashes'. Of course this will delete all files with this pattern.

[Yzöwl]

Did you try

Del /f/a/q %SystemDrive%\*.Trashes

[Rez.]

Did you try

Del /f/a/q %SystemDrive%\*.Trashes

That worked a treat - Thank you for the assist.