Forward slashes in filenames 2895

On Sat, 05 Feb 2005 16:15:34 +0000, mjt staggered into the Black Sun and said:

Grunff has a bunch of CDs that were made using a MacOS CD-writing program of some sort. Many of the files on these CDs have in their filenames.

This may prove problematic since there's code in the kernel that parses as a directory delimiter. As I understand it, there are exactly 2 characters that are verboten in filenames on a Linux system--NUL and . Everything else is cool, though it's usually best to have your filenames match A-Za-z0-9-.+ since *(){}"' can cause shell quoting annoyances and so forth.

Fortunately, since the problem files here are on a CD, there's a way around it--albeit a semi-annoying way. You can always mount the CD like so:

mount -t iso9660dev-cdrommnt-cdrom -o norock,nojoliet

...and the characters will disappear from the filenames, since isn't allowed in the "real" names on an ISO9660 filesystem. The big downside is that the filenames will all revert to 31-character max (if you're lucky) or 8+3 (if you're not.) OTOH, it'll be easier to deal with copying the files this way. It's possible you could mount the CDs with norock,nojoliet to do the file copying, then umount the CDs, remount them normally, grab the filenames, run the names through "sed -e 's#-##g' " , and rename the copied files in a semi-automated fashion. You'll have to try it out though. HTH, let us know how you get on.

-- Matt GThere is no Darkness in Eternity-But only Light too dim for us to see Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong