Howdy Bros. I am working on a script to rename some pdf files on a windoze machine. Someone has generated a spreadsheet with the name of a subfolder the file is in, the new filename it's supposed to get, and the existing filename.

I started by writing a script to stat the existing files like so 

use strict;
my $workdir = "C:/work";
open(IN,"pdffix.txt") or die "Can't open input: $!\n";
while(<IN>) {
    chomp;
    my ($folder,$newfn,$pdfn) = split(/\t/);
    $pdfn =~ s/^\"|\"$//g;
    my $filename = "$workdir/$folder/$pdfn";
    unless (-e $filename) {
        print "can't find $folder $pdfn\n";
    }
}

[download]
This works for most of the pdfs, but others have filenames with odd characters (commas, hyphens, colons, parens, underscores; part of the reason they need renaming), and aren't being recognized by stat even though they exist in the directory.

Presumably I won't be able to rename a file I can't stat, so how do I properly specify these odd filenames?

Thanks

Steve

In reply to Handling windoze filenames with odd charactters by cormanaz

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