Listing files with long names or paths (255 chars or more)

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Level 1

8 points

Listing files with long names or paths (255 chars or more)

Hi all,

I've been given the task of moving the data off our mac file servers to a windows server, and this introduces the issue of long file/path names.

http://vlaurie.com/computers2/Articles/filenames.htm

Just wondering if there is a program or terminal command I can run, that will list all files that either have names too long, or have a name/path combination that is too long, so I can go and rename/action them?

Multiple XServes, Mac OS X (10.6.4)

Posted on Sep 22, 2010 9:49 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Antoine Durr

Level 1

15 points

Sep 22, 2010 10:46 PM in response to Bizarro

find . -name \* -type f | perl -ne 's/(.*)/print length($1), " $1\n"/e' | sort -nu

Find files of any name starting from here (your current working directory), pass to Perl regular expression which replaces the entire line with the length of the line and the original line, thus making it ready for the sort (numerical, biggest last).

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Answer 2

Syth

Level 1

50 points

Sep 22, 2010 11:20 PM in response to Antoine Durr

Antoine Durr wrote:
find . -name \* -type f | perl -ne 's/(.*)/print length($1), " $1\n"/e' | sort -nu

Nice!

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Answer 3

Bizarro Author

Level 1

8 points

Sep 26, 2010 3:10 PM in response to Syth

You are a champion! Thanks heaps 🙂

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Answer 4

Bizarro Author

Level 1

8 points

Sep 29, 2010 6:50 PM in response to Bizarro

The only bug I have found with this command is that it doesn't appear to report multiple files/paths with the same length.
Eg if there is two files with a path length of 272 characters, only 1 will appear in the results. Once you correct that filename and run the command again, the other one will appear.
Is there an easy fix? Cheers 🙂

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Answer 5

Sep 29, 2010 7:01 PM in response to Bizarro

I realized after the fact that I mean to use 'sort -nr' rather than 'sort -nu'. The 'u' is for unique, hence duplicates are ignored. 'r' is to reverse the order.

The other potential issue is that things like spaces are represented as %02D, i.e. 4 characters, rather than 1. I'm not sure which representation is correct.

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Answer 6

Bizarro Author

Level 1

8 points

Sep 29, 2010 8:39 PM in response to Antoine Durr

Ah that did the trick 🙂 The order is reversed though now, is it possible to have the longest ones at the bottom? And somehow exempt lengths longer than 230 characters from the results?

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Answer 7

Sep 29, 2010 8:54 PM in response to Bizarro

Bizarro wrote:
Ah that did the trick 🙂 The order is reversed though now, is it possible to have the longest ones at the bottom? And somehow exempt lengths longer than 230 characters from the results?

Remove the 'r' from the options. Try this:

sudo find . -name \* -type f | perl -ne 's/(.*)/print length($1), " $1\n" if (length($1)>230)/e'

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