Comments on: Quickly remove special characters from file names

By: Werner

Werner — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 06:52:10 +0000

Good day. Do you have a version one can run in cmd? No gui. Want it to rename stuff for me once a day. Would like to schedule it.

PS Awesome little app.

By: dimitar

dimitar — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 16:49:12 +0000

@Darus,

The program is already doing this. It renames the files. It does not replace them.

By: Darus Gai

Darus Gai — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 18:16:42 +0000

Hey! Thanks so much for this tool! Im looking to rename the files instead of replacing them. Do you think you could share the source so I can make the code change? I’ll email you all the edits I make so you can upload it back to this blog.

By: dimitar

dimitar — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 15:41:36 +0000

@Kercheval,

I have no experience with MS power shell or management shell. I am not really a .NET person This is something fairly simple and if MS’s “power” shell cannot do this, then I doubt it could do anything! I just do not know enough about it to provide you with a script.

Unfortunately I cannot give you a better answer for your meta-data problem. You will have to change the meta-data of the files before you upload them, not during. Also, depending on the file formats and what meta-data you need to change, there probably will be different tools for that.

If you just want to preserve file meta-data like creation date, permissions, etc. when uploading them, take a look at the robocopy utility.

By: Kercheval

Kercheval — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 13:19:13 +0000

Hi Dimitar

I’m from South Africa and a client that I’ve been working with requires all their product documents uploaded into a SharePoint library. There are about 40 500 files with around 3000 files that have character’s in the names. I found that out using SharePrep , unfortunately it is not a free tool. After searching a bit more I found your site. Thanks so much, your program has saved me a huge amount of time and effort. I just wanted to know could this also be done using powershell or management shell?

Also I have another major problem. I need to upload all these files and specify the required metadata. Would you know how I can bulk upload with metadata?

Thanking you in advance for your help.

By: DeKyos

DeKyos — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 16:23:47 +0000

Patrick, that’s simple:

for x in *
do
mv “$x” $(echo “$x” | sed ‘s/\ /_/g’)
done

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 01:34:30 +0000

I work in Cygwin so often get in trouble with crossing over.
My messed up files contain question marks at the end of the filename, but can see they look like below.
$ ls -b
21078.xls\r 21232.vsd\r 24296.ppt\r 24347.doc\r
The program renamefiles errors saying File 21078.xls? not found, cause = 3.
But I was able to fix my files using a shell script with tr -dc ‘[:print:]‘. I trick I found in this thread. Thanks!

By: Patrick

Patrick — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 15:34:16 +0000

This is a GREAT tool, when do you think you will have time to add the “replace spaces with_” function?

By: Chris K

Chris K — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 06:14:45 +0000

Awesome!! I’m sure this was no big deal for you to write, but this thing just made my life much easier!

Way to go!!

By: S.Mouse

S.Mouse — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 12:59:36 +0000

Hi there,

I just wanted to say thank you for this great little piece of software. I’ve had numerous files containing Japanese characters that cause one of my machines to crash and this will save me a lot of frustration.

Thanks again.