Thank you very much for the help.. I finally got it to work. None of the filenames themselves have any unicode characters, it's just this one folder name. I couldn't get it to all go through the way I wanted it with one command, but I figured out a batch file scheme to rename the files afterwards... here's what I ended up with:
C:\util\exiftool.exe -SubIFD:CFAPattern2="2 1 1 0" %~dps1 -ext dng
ren "%~dps1*.dng_original" *.orig
ren %~dps1*.dng










?-CS.dng
ren %~dps1*.orig *.dng
Pause
with this I just need to drag and drop one file from the folder I wish to process, and it will process all the files in that folder, so much easier than trying to highlight all the files, especially since I can't find something like 'select all' in windows 7.. there's probably a way to do it but I don't know what it is, and it's not listed in any of the pulldowns or by right clicking.. anyway, since I always want to process the entire folder, dragging and dropping just one random file from that folder is quick and easy and it work with this.
This ends up with the changed files called DSC05734-CS.dng and ends up giving the backups their original names back.
I couldn't get it to work another way such as with the -O command because I couldn't get it to pass along the correct filename
I have to rename all the .dng_original files to something else first otherwise they get renamed with the *.dng rename.. and then I ended up with things like DSC05734-CS.dng.dng_original.. I can't remember if it was that exactly but something I along those lines.
I don't understand why or how they broke it so ren *.dng *-cs.dng wouldn't work.. but that results in a file called
DSC05734.dng-CS.dng but the ?'s work and I'll never have a file name longer than all those.
I'm sure these little quirks have to do with long file names... but anyway, I got it to work, so thanks for the help and advice!
as you pointed out, this will only work to fix unicode in the path, not the file names, but that's fine for my purposes.
If there's a better way I could have done this, I'd like to hear it, but since this is working, no need to think to much about it.