Many AFNI programs check filenames for "bad" characters, to prevent someone from creating a filename with a control character or other strange things inside them -- things that are perfectly legal in Unix, but tend to cause trouble for the user on the command line.

My guess is that the Chinese characters in the directory name are causing this difficulty. We have never dealt with such filenames before, and at this time my only advice would be to use directory and filenames that stick to the Latin alphabet. I don't even know how to deal with non-ASCII filenames or non-ASCII (e.g., Unicode) characters easily in C.