Could it essentially be going too fast and renaming some to "" which causes Windows to delete them? I figured an error would appear somewhere if it failed to rename something.

from perldoc -f rename:

rename OLDNAME,NEWNAME
        Changes the name of a file; an existing file NEWNAME will be
        clobbered. Returns true for success, false otherwise.

[download]
C:\temp>touch foo1.txt

C:\temp>touch foo2.txt

C:\temp>dir foo?.txt
 Il volume nell'unità C non ha etichetta.
 Numero di serie del volume: 0464-729A

 Directory di C:\temp

01/06/2007  19.36                 0 foo1.txt
01/06/2007  19.37                 0 foo2.txt
               2 File              0 byte
               0 Directory   4.888.121.344 byte disponibili

C:\temp>perl -e "rename 'foo1.txt', 'foo2.txt'"

C:\temp>dir foo?.txt
 Il volume nell'unità C non ha etichetta.
 Numero di serie del volume: 0464-729A

 Directory di C:\temp

01/06/2007  19.36                 0 foo2.txt
               1 File              0 byte
               0 Directory   4.808.515.584 byte disponibili

[download]

Use e.g. -f to check for the existence of the destination before possibly clobbering it.

In reply to Re: Renaming a group of files occassionally deletes some by blazar
in thread Renaming a group of files occassionally deletes some by coldfingertips

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