Sorry, I had sent my question to talk-request@gtlug.org. I guess that is why you did not receive it. I usually do an hour of research before I reach out to this group, just so you know.

Thanks, Howard, for your response. I will check out your how-to.

Quote: "Chris, I have posted a UNIX Command Line HOWTO on my website. I explain wildcards on it. http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson/UnixHowto.html

-- Howard Gibson"

Thanks, Kevin for your reply. I will try your suggestions below (however, renaming the file was not working for me, and that's why I originally reached out. Catch 22: Could not open file because of '?' and could not rename file because of '?'

Quote: "Regarding the question, if you are using the command line you can use \ to escape the ? when entering the copy command. You could also use
"cp -i start_of_filename* some_destination" then say yes or no as to which file(s) you want to copy. If you want to copy the file from a graphical desktop you can open the file browser program (e.g. caja in Linux Mint) and use it to select and copy the file.

You may want to rename the file to remove the ? from the filename to make it easier to work with the file.

--
Cheers!

Kevin."

Below I cut n pasted my orginal post and follow-up. I'm trying to play catch-up here while making the post make sense, chronologically:

I'm getting input/output error at command line, as well as in the GUI.
mv /media/owner/Storage/Pictures/HelenAlbum/1953?0000.helengr13grad17craigcres.jpg 19530000.helengr13grad17craigcres.jpg
mv: cannot stat '/media/owner/Storage/Pictures/HelenAlbum/1953?0000.helengr13grad17craigcres.jpg': Input/output error

On 2021-02-19 7:24 a.m., Chris Aitken wrote:

Now I can't access the folder contents. It seems by using a '?' in a file name, I've caused a problem. It was never an issue until now. I use this external SATA drive in USB docking station, and go back and forth between ubuntu and W10 computers, to make backups.

On 2021-02-19 6:10 a.m., Chris Aitken wrote:

Hi,
I can't rename files on my external drive in Ubuntu. I've tried a few things that people have posted about Nautilus. But this is not Nautilus - the application is just called 'Files'.
Chris