Question

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?

Answer 1

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?