Hi everybody.

This request for help does not have to do with reversing per se, but you are the crowd that knows most of the tricks, so there it goes:

I have 5560 files in a zip disk. They were transferred from an Mac machine to IBM format. As it is costummary, the name of the file gets a '!' symbol in front of it. ie: "num0001.seq" became "!num0001.seq". So far no problem. Now I have to put this files on a unix server. Unix does not like the files starting with '!'. I don't think I want to rename 5560 files manually, one by one!.
So here is my problem. I remembered good old Norton's Diskedit DOS version. I was planning to access the disk and change the attribute 'D'of the subdirectory that contains my files , open it with a text editor and replace all the '!' with something else, but the old diskedit version I have does not work with 32 bit FAT, and does not recognize ZIP drives. While coding a C utility to do the renaming may do the trick, I think there must be a simpler way. Questions to the public:

Does anybody know a utility to manipulate folders at low level?
Does anybody know a diskeditor like utility that works with FAT32 and or ZIP drives and can manipulate subdirectory entries (WINHEX can't)?
Does anybody know a simple way to rename 5K plus files without going crazy?

Thank you for your help.

Personally I'd abandon all plans of low level editing and other wonderful exercises. You could go for a cheap n dirty batch file solution..

output all your filenames to a file DIR /B > files.txt

open files.txt in ultraedit

construct an ultraedit macro to take each filename, remove the ! and build a move command from it

run the batch file


Alternatively, dont be so lazy and just write an app to do it :-)
Its so mundanely trivial you could have coded it in the time I've written this reply!

Carpathia

Or you could just type
ren !*.* a*.*

Thankyou Carpathia for the advise and the Chastising I deserve it. I do not write code in a routine basis, so even a trivial program implies dusting my rusty skills.
The Ren !*.* A*.* worked! thanks. For some obscure reason it does not work in a ZIP drive (?). But once I moved every thing to a HD it went smoothly.