dimitar.me

Quickly remove special characters from file names

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September 1st 2010 – Version (2.3 Beta) is available. It adds the following new features:

• A “Dry Run” mode. In this mode the application will only display and log the changes to the file/directory names without actually renaming the files and directories. This gives the user the ability to get an idea about what will be done before taking the plunge.
• Fixes a bug where if a file or directory name contains only special characters, the renaming will fail and the recursive algorithm would try to keep going.

June 24th 2010 – Version (2.2 Beta). It adds the following new features:

• Special characters could be removed from directory names as well.
• It could be run in recursive mode that will allow renaming of all files and/or directories in all the sub-directories.
• Removing all the dots in the file names but the last one that indicates the file extension.
• The underscore is no longer considered a special character and it is not removed from the file names.

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A few years ago I wrote a small application to remove all special characters from the file names of all the files in a directory.

Very often I would get a bunch of files that needed to be posted on a website and most of them would contain all kinds of special characters. I got fed up doing it manually- file by file, so I wrote this small app.

This is a Windows application written in C++ and works with win 98 and up. Of course Linux does not need anything like that, since you can do this with a quick one line shell command.

It only works with ASCII file names (sorry if you use any other language than English). I could have just as easily wrote it for UNICODE, but I had no need for that.

So, I decided to share it with anyone who wants to use it:

New v.2.3b: RenameFiles ver.2.3b
Old v.2.2b: RenameFiles ver.2.2 b
Old v.1.0:RenameFiles ver.1.0.

It is just a simple executable and does not need any installation. Keeping it simple is the key here. It also creates a log file in the same directory that the executable is in. The log file keeps track of the original file names and the new file names, so you can always find out what was done.