How can we rename a file with semi-colon as part of the filename?

Question

I tried to rename all file with extension "XLS;1" to "XLS" but it just didn't work.

I tried the following in cygwin in windows xp and they don't work:

mv *.XLS;1 *.XLS

mv *.XLS\;1 *.XLS

mv "*.XLS;1" *.XLS

Answer 1

The problem isn't the semicolon, your second example would take care of that. The problem is that Linux/Unix utilities (and, by extension, Cygwin) don't take that instruction to mean "move all files ending in .XLS;1 to .XLS," as I understand Windows does. You need to move each file individually:

for file in *.XLS\;1; do 
    mv "$file" "${file%;1}"
done

An explanation:

This takes all files ending in .XLS;1 and stores them one at a time into a variable named $file. For each file, we tell it to move that $file to a new name we create by chopping ;1 off the back of $file.

Answer 2

Cygwin has util-linux package which contains rename:

rename ".XLS;1" ".XLS" *.XLS\;1

Or if there are no other semicolons in the file names, this is enough:

rename ";1" "" *.XLS\;1

Answer 3

You can move by inode.

To find the inode

ls -i 

using the inode you just found

find . -inum <you just found> -exec mv {} <new name> \;

That should work on a unix system. No idea about cygwin.