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bashsedfat32

Truncate files names over 255 characters

I am trying to copy some files with long file names onto an old Windows XP 32bit FAT32 system and I am getting errors of having too long file names. How could I recursively search through a directory for file names greater than or equal to 255 chars and truncate them as appropriate for a FAT32 filesystem?

Solution

  • I'm sure find can do the whole job, I couldn't quite get the last step so resorted to using some bash foo:

    #/bin/bash

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -regextype posix-extended -regex ".{255,}" |
while read filename
do 
    mv -n "$filename" "${filename:0:50}"
done

    Using find to get all the files with filename greater than or equal to 255 characters:

    find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -regextype posix-extended -regex ".{255,}"

    Truncate those filenames to 50 characters, -n do not overwrite an existing file.

    mv -n "$filename" "${filename:0:50}"

    Note: Can this be with the -exec option anyone?