SMB name mangling

When accessing shares on EditShare with SMB, you might encounter files and folders displayed with short alphanumeric names like XTCSEH~K, often including the tilde character. This happens when a file was originally saved using a protocol such as EFS, which allows special characters that SMB doesn't support.

Many systems are not be able to work with these files due to restrictions on characters like / ? < > \ : * | ". As such SMB automatically translates these names to accommodate these limitations with NTFS.

/ \ : for example are used, or have in the past been used, as path separators

To avoid this issue, the best practice is to use only a-z, A-Z, 0-9, dots, dashes, and underscores when saving files to maintain compatibility across protocols and operating systems.

If you discover these files and folders you should mount with EFS and rename them, removing/replacing the offending characters. It should be noted, renaming a file changes its path, so applications or projects using the original path will need to be updated.