Filed under: Enterprise, Software, Switchers
NTFSready cleans up your filename act
One of my intermittent day-job responsibilities is to move big chunks of data (20 GB or more in a session) from the friendly, forgiving, name-your-files-whatever-you-want confines of a Mac OS X server onto cranky, finicky, no-funky-characters (but portable) NAS devices so that the data can travel with a production team to some far-away city. This is generally a straightforward and simple task, except for one annoying fact: illegal characters, as SMB or NTFS define them, in file or folder names can bring those massive copies to a screeching halt. Major buzzkill! There are a few ways to clean up filenames to make them legal for transfer; I've used both FileBuddy and A Better Finder Rename with success, and ABFR even has an "NTFS legal" preset for quick action. For a single-purpose tool, though, there's now NTFSready, This 10-euro donationware tool will hunt through your files and folders for illegal characters, nuke them, and that's about all there is. Is it worth it? Well, if you need to rename files for NTFS use on an everyday basis, maybe. At 10 euro, though, I'd say you're better off paying the $19.95 for ABFR and getting the flexibility that comes with it.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Cynthia said 9:22AM on 1-30-2008
Why waste your money? Characters in filenames and folder can be replaced using Automator.
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Michael Rose said 10:21AM on 1-30-2008
Hi Cynthia --
You could build an Automator action to do this, but with the number of characters and special conditions involved (eg. "A space is legal anywhere except at the end of a file name") and the relative speeds of Automator vs. ABFR on massive file sets, the $20 is well worth it to me.
Miguel Castillo said 10:45AM on 1-30-2008
Would'nt it be simplier to create a super size Zip file, transfer it and then unzip it. Some Zip compressor rename the files with correct characters.
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Michael Rose said 10:23AM on 1-30-2008
Hi Miguel --
Since there's no console-accessible OS on the NAS devices, there's no way to run an unzip except remotely from a Mac or PC. I've tried a similar approach on some occasions and the result is neither fast nor reliable. :-(
I do pre-zip any folders containing Mac fonts, as they inevitably get destroyed by the resource-fork stripping action of copying to a NAS or SMB share.
Piotr Malecki said 12:17PM on 1-30-2008
I'm really surprised that all the major OSs (Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux [don't know about Vista]) give up when a file copy/move fails (locked files, illegal characters, etc).
Why can't they give us the option (at the end of the transfer preferably) to skip each of these "problem" files, rename them, or cancel the whole transfer.
BTW Yes I know there are apps that let you copy protected files, but this should be a feature built into the OS.
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artifex said 11:30PM on 1-30-2008
When I'm using Windows (XP) I use a program called AcdSee as my file move utility. It's really an image utility, but when moving files it will ask me if I want to skip moving identical files (checked with a hash or CRC32, I forget), overwrite the destination, rename the file being moved, etc. If I skip and they are not identical, when the move is over I will just have the files that didn't make it left, so I can do something else. None of this total fail in the middle stuff. Of course, I run into a problem because the version I use doesn't support some of these weird characters, and crashes. (Maybe a later version fixes this?) So the plugins and applets people are suggesting are still useful to run, before I chunk files over from the Mac side of things.
Yvo said 1:40PM on 1-30-2008
The problem that remains is that while from a file system point of view this problem can easily be taken care with said utility, perl script, bash script or any other type of script/program there is a problem that remains: internal file links.
I've been in (many) situations where the team that builds pdf manuals decide to liberally name their files on the mac. Port this manual over to the Windows side and suddenly some of their links break because of the file name change. I've also seen this with Director files and Flash files.
Its too bad that those expensive software programs don't come (by default) enabled in a "compatibility mode" that will yell and scream at an user for using those characters/
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Johan said 3:03PM on 1-30-2008
Apple offers a custom Automator action for this very purpose:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/automator/makenameswebfriendly.html
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latham said 3:25PM on 1-30-2008
Wish I'd known about these a month ago! Same project, data back-up to a new NAS drive. I finally found FileWrangler which worked well, tho I had to do a separate search for each illegal character (it's possible that I just couldn't see how to search for >1). FileWrangler is great for adding/changing file extensions, for example on downloaded YouTube vids.
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John H. Doe said 6:41PM on 1-30-2008
I have some files on a Windows formatted external drive that have file names too long, it seems, for OS X to handle. I can't open them using Finder or even "rm" them from the command line. Does anyone know how to deal with these files?
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artifex said 6:42PM on 1-30-2008
Cool, this answers my Ask TUAW question from a couple of weeks ago :)
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