Fix % filenames

I am one of those guys using "wget" to download things. Wget has this nasty habit of replacing special chars in files according to the URL escaping mechanisms. My favourite mp3-player Alsaplayer has or had a bug, where it didn't want to play files named with "%"s in it. As mp3-netlabels also have the nasty habit, to use special characters like "[thn001] some file.mp3" I end up with lots of files like: "%5Bthn001%5D%20some%20file.mp3" on my disk. Ugly, huh? It is.

So here's a little python script I use to rename such files in one go:

#!/usr/bin/python

import sys, os, urllib

dirs = sys.argv[1:] 
if not dirs:
    dirs = "."

for d in dirs:
    if os.path.isdir(d):
        print "Working on %s" % d
        print "===========" + "="*len(d)

        for f in os.listdir(d):
            n = urllib.unquote(f)
            if f != n:
                f = os.path.join(d,f)
                n = os.path.join(d,n)
                if not os.path.exists(n):
                    try:
                        os.rename(f,n)
                        print "Moved: %s to %s" % (f,n)
                    except Exception, err:
                        print """Error: 
Could not move %s to %s because "%s" """ % (f,n,err)
                else:
                    print """WARNING: file "%s" already exists. 
Move it out of the way first!""" % n

Save this as e.g. "fixnames.py" and call it from the command line as:

$ fixnames.py somedirectory /some/other/dir /even/more/dirs

If you omit the directory list, the current dir will be used silently.

• unknown visitor wrote:
  Thank you thank you thank you thank you! Had the same problem for years. :-)