@aescling it didn't really barf, the icons it used to replace the emoji just looked like barf. In the command itself they appeared as those question mark boxes, and then in the program I ran it gave an error message that included the file name (with different symbols replacing the emoji in the filename) and said "failed" at the end.

So I'm going to say the command line handled it correctly, the program did not.

But obviously not a big deal, I just renamed the file.