How to rename file while copying - and remove special characters

corporal79 · 03-18-2007, 02:17 PM

The nice thing about Linux filesystems is that they support crazy characters like "?" and ":" in filenames. The bad thing is, though, that other, less-free filesystems don't. Case-in-point: an iPod with RockBox installed, which requires a VFAT data partition. So, the real question I'm getting to is this: How can I copy files from my data partition on Linux onto the RockBox iPod, without having to manually remove all the unsupported characters? Thanks.

pixellany · 03-18-2007, 02:41 PM

cp <filename> <path><newfilename>

eg: In my home directory, copy "file" to the Desktop with a new name: "newfile"

cp file Desktop/newfile

Take a look at "man cp" for more

corporal79 · 03-19-2007, 12:49 AM

Ah, yeah. I knew that - but such only works for renaming files one at a time. I'm talking about moving several hundred files with enough colons and other characters to make moving them one at a time like that very tedious. So, a better question would be: is there any way that I could move files en masse while replacing (or stripping, for that matter) said characters?

phirestalker · 10-11-2007, 05:16 PM

well this works for me with a few exceptions: unfortunately it seems find enumerates all it needs to do before starting so when you rename things with it you have to make many passes but it's something I'm using it now

find full-path-to-parent-folder -iname "*" -exec rename -v 's/\:|\*|\?|\"//g' "{}" \;

just type that above line (or copy paste) into the terminal (oh make sure to cd into the directory root of the files in question)

oh P.S. if that gives unknown command rename hopefully you can just do a sudo apt-get install rename to get it

and if you wish to remove dots from the directory names which windows seems to have a problem with over SMB you can use

find full-path-to-parent-folder -type d -exec rename -v 's/\.//g' "{}" \;