fixing (invalid coding)

[rikona]

Hello Conny,

Friday, May 17, 2013, 10:33:29 PM, Conny wrote:

>> What I was looking for was a pgm that could find all the
>> badly-named files + locations on the disk - that might be enough
>> since they can be corrected by hand if need be. The 'system' seems
>> to know when they're bad, so there might be a way to ID them. It's
>> a 'needle in the haystack' problem - find, say, 500, out of
>> 500,000... 
>>
> More on the problem: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1236012

Thanks for the pointer. I saw that when I was rummaging around for
info about the invalid coding problem. This kind of problem has been
seen by quite a few people, usually associated with file transfers
from Windows machines. The coding change from Windows does seem to fix
many of these problems. It is more difficult, however, when there are
multiple unknown codings mixed in with normal files. I did find an
untested script that illustrates how one might identify files whose
name is not coded in the correct form. It also has a section that
would attempt to fix the names, but the writer emphasizes how
dangerous that can be. In the comments, the difficulty is explained in
a bit of detail, and a commentor thought it would be too difficult to
do it reliably. The suggested approach is to just identify the files
and fix them manually. After reading a few websites I would agree with
this approach.

I would like to find something, however, that has been tested and
seems to work well. Any suggestions along this line would be
appreciated. 

I appreciate the help...

-- 

 rikona