oh lazyweb- problem copying files with : in them to n800

Posted on by Luis Villa

[Not so much lazyweb as rushed/paniced/damnI’mtryingtopackandstillhaveatleastalittlecelebrationtonightweb…]

I’m trying to copy a large number of oggs from my HD to two vfat-formatted SDHC cards in my N800, mounted over USB. (16G worth of files, to be exact.) As far as I can tell, copying files with : in them (e.g., about 10% of my ogg files) to the target drive causes cp and nautilus to choke. I’m guessing this is vfat’s fault, but the N800 doesn’t seem to like it when I format the cards as ext2.

So… anyone have any suggestions on how to either rename the files (lots of them) temporarily in such a way as to make them copiable, or otherwise work around vfat, or (maybe ideally) how to use a more modern fs altogether on sd cards that will be used only in the n800? Pointers ASAP much appreciated as I leave for NC on Sunday and would like to have my oggs on the n800 by then :)

Published by Luis Villa

14 thoughts on “oh lazyweb- problem copying files with : in them to n800”

  1. try this:

    a batch file containing:

    mv $1 `echo $1 | tr “:” “-“`

    save as ‘uncolon’.

    and then:

    find . -name “*:*”

    to check you’re only finding the files you’re after. finally

    find . -name “*:*” -exec uncolon {} \;

    nasty.

    :-)

  2. qmv is a neat tool for editing all the filenames in a directory with your favorite editor.

  3. The music management program quodlibet has a rename by tag feature that you could use to rename all your music files into any other format like //.ogg (This example would remove song titles from the oggs.) It also has a checkbox that strips non-Windows compatible characters in filenames.

  4. Looks like the blog automatically strips anything that looks like html tags.

    Originally //.ogg had artist, album, and tracknumber inside greater than and less than signs. So if I try it again using html escapes it should be:
    <artist>/<album>/<tracknumber>.ogg

  5. find -depth -name ‘*:*’ -exec rename -n ‘y/:/_/’ {} +

    (adjust -n and replacement for flavor)

    …temporarily? cp -lr into a temp tree first I guess.

  6. *cough* :\ (test before you post, grasshopper) …should have -execdir rather than -exec there, so renaming dirs on the way works out the first time, too.

  8. rsync is ported on the N800, you also have to install openssh, you’ll get 500kbyte/s over wifi. You can restart as many times as you want

    Otherwise I would just partition the card with one small FAT and one big ext3 FS, I’ve never done it but some report it works.

  10. This is a problem i have dealt with, so far i have found (2) reasons this is caused.

    Reasons:
    ———-
    (1). Any directory you copy with a space at the end to a fat drive fails — so the folder “folder1 ” will fail.
    (2). Any folder/file with the same name in same directory but diff caps will fail to fat. e.g. “folder1” & “Folder1” will fail to copy.

    Look for these files using some python/bash magic and rename them & your cp should go fine.

    I learned this the hard way deleteing most of my GF’s info (before formatting) thinking it copied fine in terminal b/c cp doesn’t report any errors.

  12. Murray: yeah, that is it.

    I’ll take a look at quodlibet and google more aggressively for maemo and ext3, I guess.

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