How To Find and Replace in Filenames?

Hope that was a good description of what i want to do.
I have an external hardrive that I did a backup using a windows machine and a different external. Glad i did because it crashed and now copying back to a new external. In the process I have noticed that:
I have a lot of spaces in filenames and maybe or maybe not in the conversion some have turned into funny hieroglyphic characters where the spaces were.

So I would like to find and replace all spaces on an entire drive with the underscore.
Then I would also like to figure out what the funny character is and replace it wiuth the underscore.

Does finder only find? or is there a hidden feature like this?

I do remember doing something like this in Unix a million years ago but can't remember if it was one file at a time, or one subdirectory. I have burned a few thousand of my cd's so need something to work all the way through a directory.

Thanks for any help or any leads.

iMac, Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Posted on May 2, 2010 2:01 PM

Reply
4 replies

May 2, 2010 8:32 PM in response to RonsMac

NameChanger [http://www.mrrsoftware.com/MRRSoftware/NameChanger.html]

Renamer4Mac [http://renamer4mac.com/batch-rename-files-on-mac-osx.html] - now shareware but older versions may still be free.

psrenamer [http://www.powersurgepub.com/downloads.html#psrenamer] - Java based (=slightly slow) free utility.

Name Mangler [http://www.manytricks.com/namemangler> - requires OS 10.5+, but File List [http://www.manytricks.com/download/filelist] is an older version for pre-10.5.

[http://www.publicspace.net/ABetterFinderRename>

May 3, 2010 7:31 AM in response to Limnos

Thanks for the replies.

Found this page:
http://maketecheasier.com/2-ways-to-batch-rename-files-in-os-x/2009/05/16

Tried the Automator find and replace on a directory an it worked great. Going t try on a thumb drive to see if it will do the whole thing. At school the files are always like Homework 1.doc or whatever. Can't remember why spaces are bad

Thanks for the help, will post back if I have issues with Automator.

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How To Find and Replace in Filenames?

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