I've never seen this before - only found it because Time Machine kept failing (on Mac OS X High Sierra 10.13.6). A similar question was asked here ~7 years go but it was not solved (and he did not have symlink issues): File names in OS X appearing with question marks
I ran disk repair several times from Disk Utility.app (which did not find or fix any errors).
I determined the only location with this issue was iTunes Media/Music folder, so I zipped up the entire folder to force symlink resolution. This worked to resolve the ghost symlinks (some had 4 hops noted but no source). Backups now run without error (-48 and -8062).
What I've not been able to fix is the random '?' character in the file.
I tried the solution noted here: Remove question mark "?" from file names OSX which seemed like it would be perfect, but it had no effect. The "?" still persists even after the mv operation, specifically:
find . -type f -name '*?*' | while read f; do mv "$f" "${f//\?/}"; done
In Finder, no ? appears and you cannot grep "?" out of the name, so strictly speaking, the character does not appear to exist. They only appear in Terminal:
MacBook-Pro:Welcome Reality +$ ls -lsuG
total 177456
20656 -rw-r--r-- 1 User group 10572851 Jan 12 09:31 02 ?Doomsday.mp3
14944 -rw-r--r-- 1 User group 7645727 Jan 12 09:31 03 My Eyes (G3dit).mp3
23632 -rw-r--r-- 1 User group 12093176 Jan 12 09:31 03 ?My Eyes.mp3
18768 -rw-r--r-- 1 User group 9605621 Jan 12 09:31 04 Guilt.mp3
20336 -rw-r--r-- 1 User group 10407761 Jan 12 09:31 06 ?Me and You.mp3
19968 -rw-r--r-- 1 User group 10220743 Jan 12 09:31 11 ?Must Be the Feeling.mp3
17104 -rw-r--r-- 1 User group 8749666 Jan 12 09:31 13 Promises.MP3
19920 -rw-r--r-- 1 User group 10194622 Jan 12 09:31 15 ?Won't You (Be There).mp3
21952 -rw-r--r-- 1 User group 11232230 Jan 12 09:31 17 ?Promises (Skrillex & Nero Remix).mp3
16 -rw-r--r-- 1 User group 7366 Jan 12 09:31 AlbumArtSmall.jpg
80 -rw-r--r-- 1 User group 35880 Jan 12 09:31 Folder.jpg
MacBook-Pro:Welcome Reality +$ find . -type f | grep ?
*[no results returned]*
MacBook-Pro:Welcome Reality +$ find . -type f | grep M
./03 My Eyes (G3dit).mp3
./03 My Eyes.mp3
./06 Me and You.mp3
./11 Must Be the Feeling.mp3
./13 Promises.MP3
And here's what I see in Finder:
Does anyone in 2019 have any idea what is going on here?
ls *oomsday* | od -c
for example?ls
is showing it as "?" because it's not a normal character. In fact, it's a UTF-8 byte order mark, which doesn't really have any business appearing in a filename (although it's not strictly illegal). My guess is that it's somehow in the track name in the .mp3, and iTunes just blindly used that in the filename. Deleting and retyping the track name in iTunes' Song Info window might fix it.