Which file name characters should be avoided?

Help and Support
1

The files in my video library are created in windows. Which file name characters (that windows thinks is OK) should still not be used because OSMC doesn’t like them?

2

Hi,

Avoid using special characters:

https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide/SpecialCharacters

Although I’d had thought windows, would prevent using most of these as well.

Thanks Tom.

3

Thanks, that helps a lot

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4

I’ve yet to run across (at least that I recall) a file name that Windows will allow you to create that Kodi on Linux will have an issue with. If your having an issue with some particular item not scraping correctly then this is unlikely to be the cause. For example Kodi is totally fine with using a file path with a Windows “\hidden$\” folder even though the dollar sign is a special character.

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5

I had a problem with one of my files that had a “&” in the file name, when the “&” was changed to “and” the movie scrapped fine. Although there are many more with the “&” that scrape fine, so I don’t know.

6

While not really recommended, & is a valid character in a filename. It’s probably the name of the movie on TMDB has and instead of & as the title.

If the drive is formatted EXT4 then the only invalid characters are / and NULL.

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7

Filesystem like ext4 is rather forgiving, but In my case I had a rather unique file-name, on a exfat drive, write to by a windows system that converted some special krylic or assian characters, to my swedish windows enviroment and wrote alot of “strange chars in the filename”, fine could still read and copy it in windows and linux via midnight commander, but when i tried to move or delete the file something in the filesystem or fuse, said there were problems with the file. So even if one OS interpitation of a filesystem standard says filename are only restricted “/” and NULL.

As a rule, now that we move hdds/pendrives around multiple OS’s, I choose to use A-Z,a-z,1-9 and _. Because I never know when there is going to be a Windows/DOS/AmigaOS/iOS/Linux/DEC reading from the drive with some “custom filesystem handling”?? Does that make sense?