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If, like most of us, you use Windows, at some point you've probably gotten a notification

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that looks like this, telling you that you can't use certain characters in a filename.

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But why? I mean, quotes and question marks are common enough in everyday use, so why can't I just

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put them in the friggin' file and what the heck is going on? Is Microsoft just trying to play mind games with us, or do they actually have a good reason?

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It turns out, these restrictions are due to how the operating system itself reads filenames.

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You see, Windows uses certain characters to denote certain actions the operating system

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needs to follow when it's working with a file. You're probably familiar with how backslash precedes the name of a subfolder, and as such,

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you cannot put a backslash in the filename, since otherwise Windows would confuse the

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filename for another folder that isn't even there.

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Similarly, you can't use a colon, since Windows understands a colon to denote a drive letter,

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which comes at the beginning of a file path to tell Windows what drive to begin looking

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for the file on. What about forward slash?

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Well, these can still be used to point to certain resources.

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Think about how you can have a shortcut on your desktop to a certain web page that uses

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forward slashes in the URL. The question mark, ironically, has the potential to cause Windows some confusion as well.

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You can actually use it as a wildcard of sorts when you run a search.

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For example, if you want to find all the files that match most of a certain filename, you

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can throw in a question mark to tell Windows to return a result for any character in that

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space where the question mark is. So it follows that you simply can't use it in your filenames.

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Oh, and the asterisk is restricted for similar reasons, as if you search for something like

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asterisk.png, you'll get all png files in whichever folder you're searching.

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Moving on, quotation marks are disallowed because Windows reserves them to indicate

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a full path if the path itself has a space in it.

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If you bring up a window shortcut, you can see that the path it's pointing to will often

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include quotes by default. This is especially useful if you're trying to put modifiers after the path.

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For example, if you're trying to force a game to run in a certain sized window, you can

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try putting a space after the filename, then hyphen w hyphen r followed by your desired

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resolution. These quotes help Windows know that the space after the filename isn't part of the path,

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and that you're instead trying to tell Windows to do something else.

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And there are other disallowed characters that you may not see unless you're using

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the command line instead of the typical Windows GUI.

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The greater and less than symbols fall into this category, for example.

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For the other characters and uses that we don't have time for today, I'm sure some

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of you can discuss those in the comments and help us out. Of course, Windows approach to this isn't always super intuitive, which is why the

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frustration stems to begin with. You can still use periods in a filename, even though the last period denotes the beginning

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of the extension, which tells Windows what kind of file it is, so that's a little inconsistent.

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And why can't you, for example, use a colon later on in the filename as it's typically

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just the first one in the path that denotes a drive letter?

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Sometimes characters are restricted simply to avoid confusion, and I get this, can be

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frustrating, but you can always substitute my personal favorite, the semicolon, right?

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So thanks for watching, guys. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up, hit subscribe, and be sure to hit us up

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in the comments section with your suggestions for topics that we should cover in the future.