UNIX Desktop Questions & Answers

I received an external hd from a friend which contained folder names with the pipe character between words. I assumed he had used Unix to create the folders. I installed Cygwin believing I could rename the folders and all would be good. The emulator will bash the second and third words in the name after executing the mv command. I would think the emulator would work for this simple task. Any ideas?

Examples of the problem, and the steps you've taken might help as a visual, but have you tried to encase the file and/or path given to mv with single-quotes (ie, mv -f 'bad|file|name.txt' '/tmp/bad/file/name.txt')? Oftentime, I've used this to alleviate problems caused by embedded spaces created by test scripts, etc.

I'd expect you'd also need to mv them another file system just to ensure you're not clobbering the input file...your original drive likely has no real directory structure beyond root, just a single listing of files with these pipes embedded.

Windows simply doesn't allow certain filenames in folders. *, |, ?, slashes and the like are forbidden. It's behavior when forced to deal with those filenames anyway is undefined.

What filesystem is the external drive?

I thought the emulator would get me around it. I guess I'll have to find a Linux machine to rename the folders.

Cygwin is not an emulator. It runs inside Windows and has all the same limits.

It would be really helpful to know what the external drive's filesystem was.

Try a Knoppix livecd. You can boot into a complete Linux system off DVD without installing anything on your computer.

That would explain it. I really appreciate that and I'll take your advice.