Windows 10 cannot access the specified device, path, or file when using full path to executable, running as Administrator

Question

Note : I\'ve replace the directory with a and the exe with b.exe and I\'ve repeat every test I have made to make sure it\'s not a typi

Answer 1

I found it !!

It's some extra non-printable bytes added in file path when Copying / Pasting from some labels in Windows 10 explorer.

Consider this piece of code :

Console.WriteLine(new DirectoryInfo(@"c:\a\"));
Console.WriteLine(new DirectoryInfo(@"‪c:\a\"));  

These line looks the same and should not raise any exception (even if directory c:\a doesn't exist) but actually if you copy/paste the code above in an application, the second line will raise NotSupportedException with words : "The given path's format is not supported".

I've ended up checking .NET source code and I found method StringExpressionSet.Canonicalize which raised NotSupportedException :

...
 if (path.IndexOf( ':', 2 ) != -1)
      throw new NotSupportedException( Environment.GetResourceString( "Argument_PathFormatNotSupported" ) );
...

And actually :

Console.WriteLine(@"c:\a\".IndexOf( ':', 2 )); //  results -1
Console.WriteLine(@"‪c:\a\".IndexOf( ':', 2 )); //  result 2
// Copy/Paste to test

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Where did I caught it ?

In order to not making any typing mistake, I'm used to copy directory path from Right Click to a file -> Properties -> Security

You are warned now !