How do I remove a file named "NUL" on Windows?
Try
Del \\?\C:\My\Path\NUL
in the command prompt.
See this Microsoft Support article for details: You cannot delete a file or a folder on an NTFS file system volume, under "Cause 5: The file name includes a reserved name in the Win32 name space".
Alternatively if you have Cygwin installed, you may want to know, that it has no problem with such files or folders. Particularly,
rm -r /cygdrive/c/path/to/the/file/or/folder/you/want/to/delete
typed in the Cygwin terminal deletes the file or folder named nul
or a folder, containing it. This is also applicable to other special file names such as CON
, PRN
, AUX
, COM1
, COM2
, COM3
, COM4
, COM5
, COM6
, COM7
, COM8
, COM9
, LPT1
, LPT2
, LPT3
, LPT4
, LPT5
, LPT6
, LPT7
, LPT8
.
I'm adding this here because it is high in the google results and I had a similar issue for a folder named NUL. Unfortunately the above fixes didnt help. Neither did a ton of other stuff I looked at.
I tried rmdir\\?\C:\My\Path\NUL
and rmdir\\.\C:\My\Path\NUL
without any success and also tried several commands using bash from my SourceTree installation. No joy.
In the end I used DIR /X /A
from cmd to list the short names in the parent directory. This returned NUL~1
for my NUL folder.
This was then used in the standard command rmdir /s NUL~1
and finally fixed the problem.