Fixing illegal file names on NTFS partitions

[Phenomic]

Linux creates illegal filenames on NTFS partitions.

How I get them:

- I create bookmarks by dragging URLs from the browser into some directory.

- I download European movies and sitcoms with non-western(?) characters.

It looks like this:

Some files are unreadable, some are hard to fix by renaming in Explorer. Linux will even save two identical filenames in the same dir but with different case, ugh! (Guess what happens to these when you delete one? Both get deleted!) CHKDSK doesn’t complain or attempt to fix them.

I’m looking for a utility to go through partitions and fix all these, by replacing illegal characters (using some kind of rule). Probably a batch file, or CreateFile API applet, or whatever.

Any ideas?

Edited February 14, 2012 by Phenomic

[tomasz86]

You may want to try this utility.

[Phenomic]

You may want to try this utility.

Thank you. I can't read Polish GUI. I have a collection of european movies and I don't want to risk deleting anything. But bookmarks containing illegal chars should probably be converted to EN.

[allen2]

I never had this kind of problem with recent linux ntfs r/w support or ntfs3g.

It looks like a code page problem. Does the filenames are ok (without the "?") under linux ?

[Phenomic]

I never had this kind of problem with recent linux ntfs r/w support or ntfs3g.

It looks like a code page problem. Does the filenames are ok (without the "?") under linux ?

I didn’t research all the causes. Some apps are not reading unicode filenames correctly. But Linux is definitely creating file names with illegal chars, or 2 files named “FileName” and “filename”. And Firefox will save any Flash movie you’re watching on YouTube with its original name. Also Drag some URLs from the browser and you’ll see... I just opened Nautilus and created a new file named “\\new> file |”.