SPE throws error " file or directory does not exist." when scanning files with Polish, Danish Characters ą, ä

Products

• Protection Engine for Cloud Services
• Protection Engine for NAS

Issue/Introduction

SPE seems to be unable to successfully scan files that contain special, national characters in their names. This issue particularly arises with characters such as "ą", "ę", "ź" (Polish) and "æ", å,"ø" (Danish).

"{"scanStatus":"SCAN_SUCCESS","fileScanned":"på.txt","fileStatus":"FILE_ACCESS_FAILED","fileQuarantineStatus":"NOT_AVAILABLE","totalInfections":0,"virusDefinitionDate":"2023-11-08T23:00:00.000+00:00","virusDefinitionRevisionNumber":"025","bytesScanned":-1,"totalFilesScanned":-1,"trueTypeOfFile":"NA"}"

copy the files locally and scan them using the command shown in the attached capture below:

The same result when trying to scan using cmdline tool included in scan engine folder of SPE direcotry:

C:\Program Files\Symantec\Scan Engine\CmdLineScanner\C>ssecls.exe pąpä.txt
"papä.txt" file or directory does not exists.

C:\Program Files\Symantec\Scan Engine\CmdLineScanner\C>ssecls.exe papa.txt

    Virus scan process began : Fri Nov 17 15:05:03 2023
Virus scan process completed : Fri Nov 17 15:05:03 2023

        Defs Version = 20231113.025
 Commandline Scanner = 9.0.0.1

         Total Bytes = 101184 (Kbytes 98.8125)
             Elapsed = 0.0290
           Scan Rate =  3.33 (Mbytes/sec)

      Files Excluded = 0
       Files Scanned = 1
 Directories Scanned = 0
Directories Excluded = 0
       Files Skipped = 0
    Files Scan Error = 0
      Files Infected = 0

Data based metering parameters:
Data Scanned in bytes = -1 (NA)
Total files scanned = -1 (NA)

No error was found during the scan

 

Environment

Environment details:

• SPE version: one server is running 9.0.1.5
• OS of SPE server (V 9.0.1.5): Windows Server 2022 standard (English).
• The server is not enrolled within the centralized cloud console.
• The issue exists since the beginning, it wasn’t working before.
• Nothing was changed within the configuration, everything kept default.

Resolution

Scanning a file with a file name having Polish characters works fine, check the below screenshot for your reference.

UTF8 is not enabled, as a result, scanning of files with Unicode fails. Please follow the below steps to enable UTF-8 in your SPE scanner machine:

Go to the "Region" settings of the Windows machine, and follow the numbers highlighted in the screenshot below to enable UTF-8 and then restart the system, and then try scanning files with files having polish characters.

The result from cmdline testing locally from the SPE server will be also successful: 

C:\Program Files\Symantec\Scan Engine\CmdLineScanner\C>ssecls.exe ppä.txt

    Virus scan process began : Tue Nov 28 13:13:28 2023
Virus scan process completed : Tue Nov 28 13:13:28 2023

        Defs Version = 20231115.007
 Commandline Scanner = 9.0.0.1

         Total Bytes = 101184 (Kbytes 98.8125)
             Elapsed = 0.0540
           Scan Rate =  1.79 (Mbytes/sec)

      Files Excluded = 0
       Files Scanned = 1
 Directories Scanned = 0
Directories Excluded = 0
       Files Skipped = 0
    Files Scan Error = 0
      Files Infected = 0

Data based metering parameters:
Data Scanned in bytes = -1 (NA)
Total files scanned = -1 (NA)

No error was found during the scan