drifting turtle
In Windows, when creating a save named "...", the resulting save directory cannot be deleted by normal means.
The problem is that the save title is used as the directory name on disk, and the game's save system does not prevent writing invalid filenames. In Windows path parsing, ... is used as a shorthand to refer to "the directory above dot dot" and gets confused when this is part of a path. Windows won't let you create a file with this name in Explorer but the file system doesn't prevent it from being created, and once it exists Windows Explorer can't be used to delete or manage it.
Repro steps:
- While in game, save your game as "..." (without the quotes)
- Observe errors such as
ERROR: Cannot write file Saves//.../saveInfo.json. Filename contains illegal characters. - Navigate to your savegame directory, and attempt to enter the '...' directory.
- Observe that you can do this infinitely
- Navigate back to the savegame directory
- Attempt to delete the '...' folder in Windows explorer.
- Observe that you cannot.
In order to successfully delete the file, you must use an Administrator-enabled cmd prompt to delete the entire 'Saves' directory recursively with rmdir /s /q Saves , which will delete all of your saves if you haven't backed them up.
Please note that just escaping so that the filenames are alphanumeric may not be good enough to avoid problems: there are certain strings, such as CON, COM1, LPT1, and others which are reserved keywords from the DOS days, and which can be expected to explode spectacularly if they're referenced in place of a normal filename. Please consider completely disconnecting user-input strings from filenames written to disk .
