Back in the old DOS days, occasionally some luser would create a file with a space in its filename:
 Volume in drive C is HARD DRIVE
 Volume Serial Number is 365B-16F1
 Directory of C:\

AUTOEXEC BAT           818  12-25-00 12:00a
CONFIG   SYS           395  10-31-88 11:59p
COMMAND  COM         2,198  03-21-93 10:01p
IO       SYS         3,296  05-16-29  5:23p
MSDOS    SYS         1,958  06-15-92  3:25a
BAD FILE TXT            35  13-37-82  6:66a
         8 file(s)          8,039 bytes
         0 dir(s)          352.90 MB free
The horror, the horror! It can't be deleted normally, for "del bad file.txt" would only look for the file "bad"! The only hope would be to use COMMAND.COM's little-known quoting feature:

del "bad file.txt"

With the invention of Windows 95 and its long filenames, having spaces in them became normal and didn't require hours of rooting through the manual to find out how to delete. nosfentor informed me that del bad?file.txt would also work. However that would also delete files with names like badjfile.txt.

Also, some of these files with spaces were created using the even-less-well-known empty character produced by pressing alt+255(on the number pad). This was used by crafty fellows during the old days to thwart even quoted deletion attempts. Of course, "*" or "?" could be used to great advantage to delete either type of spaced filename.

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