SUMMARY: Ascii chars. in file names

From: Kevin P. Inscoe (kpi@hobbes.crc.com)
Date: Wed Nov 20 1996 - 12:42:09 CST


My original question was:

I have some Macs using Columbia AppleTalk to some partitions on my
SunOS 4.1.3 system. I have found 2 directories that I cannot acccess
either from CAP or unix. ls -l show this:

drwxrwx--- 13 techpub techpub 512 Apr 5 1996 ?WP Files
drwxrwx--- 3 techpub techpub 512 Apr 5 1996 ?Secretarial
Files

ls -l | od -c shows this:

0000060 1 9 9 6 245 S e c r e t a r
i 0000100 a l F i l e s \n d r w x r w
  x 0000120 - - - 1 3 t e c h p u b
     0000140 5 1 2 A p r
 5 0000160 1 9 9 6 245 W P F i l
  e s 0000200 \n d r w x r - x r - x
2 t 0000220 e c h p u b 1
  0 2 4 0000240 A p r 5 1 9 9
6 C o

So the "?" character in the ls above is really ascii character 245.
How CAP (or the user did that I have no idea) but now I cannot cd into
the directory or access it in anyway. I did fsck. I also tried using a
windows editor to create a shell script to cd "
<ascii-245-character>Secretarial Files" and that did not work either.
Is there a tool that will help me rename the these directories to a
more civil name? I need access to the files inside these directories
ASAP. I search the archives and RTFF to no avail.

The winning answer goes to Anton Bernal <abernal@esoc.esa.de>:

Perhaps,
$ mv *ecretar* Secretarial
does what you want...

It did!

Other suggestions (which I did not get to try):

1) Escaping the special character for csh. I probably could have done
this in my special script I wrote. e.g.

 cd \?WP\ Files
 cd \?Secretarial

2) I have also found that the directory editor (dired) mode of emacs
provides a reasonable GUI like interface for working with filenames.

3) You can probably use the OpenWindows file manager (filemgr) to
rename these puppies.

4) You can also see the specials char in files with: ls -l|cat -evt

My thanks to the following individuals (and anyone else who may have
responded later):

From: James.E.Coby.Jr@cdc.com (James Coby)
From: flowe@darwin.sfbr.org (W. Frank Lowe)
From: "Brian T. Wightman" <wightman@sol.acs.uwosh.edu>
From: poffen@San-Jose.ate.slb.com (Russ Poffenberger)
From: "Trevor Paquette" <TrevorPaquette@aec.ca>
From: Jochen Bern <bern@TI.Uni-Trier.DE>
From: Rich Kulawiec <rsk@itw.com>
From: fpardo@tisny.com (Frank Pardo)
From: charest@chou.CANR.Hydro.Qc.Ca (Claude Charest)
From: Colin McNeill <colin@gtl.com>
From: "Paul O'Donnell" <pod@morgan.com>
From: Rene Wever <rxwever@sysengr.PacBell.COM>
From: ahill@lanser.net (Alan Hill)
From: "Becker, Mark" <beckerm@nasd.com>
From: popelka@cnaindex.mtb.phil.mop.com (Glenn Popelka)
From: "Marc L. Summers-SysAdmin" <marcs@tdd.hbo.nec.com>
Kevin Inscoe, System Admin. http://www.iag.net/~inscoe FAX (407) 354-1113
Coleman Research Corp. (I DON'T SPEAK FOR CRC) Digital Pager: (407) 980-8244
Launch Systems Group Finger: inscoe@iag.net Home: [MIME] inscoe@iag.net
Orlando, Florida Work: [MIME] kpi@crc.com [UUENCODE] kinscoe@mail.crc.com
"Every man dies...not every man lives" - Braveheart



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