Widows 8.1 files no longer in location — trouble deleting a file

Recently I had a file that would not delete or move to the recycle bin.  It was able to be deleted by using the command prompt.  My research led me to this page which I have quoted down below.      original page

I had this problem with a file in Windows 8. Here’s how I solved it.

The file that wasn’t responding was in C:/Users/myname/Downloads. So I opened Command Prompt and typed the following:

cd downloads

dir /x
[long list of files and folders in \Downloads, with each given an additional short name, in the case of my file it was FILE~1]

del FILE~1

…and that did it. Apparently some have had more success renaming the file:

ren FILE~1 newname
del newname