owl/man.md

owl(1)

The moon is bright. The owls are ready for the hunt.

Owl is a file renaming tool; it removes character from file names which are not compatible with FAT file systems (typically FAT32 or exFAT).

owl COMMAND OPTIONS FILE1 FILE2 ...

Rename FILEs given at the command line such that all FAT-incompatible characters are removed. By default it replaces invalid characters with _U{Unicode Code Point}_, but this can be changed, see the --strategy flag below.

Options:

-s, --strategy STRATEGY

Change what happens to invalid characters. Choices are:

• "remove": just remove the characters. If left with an empty string, rename to "_empty_".
• "represent": replace each character with "_Unum_", where "num" is the Unicode Code Point of the character.

-n, --dry-run

Causes Owl to just print a representation of what would be done without actually renaming any files.

-v, --version

Show version information.

-h, --help

Show a small help message.

Edge Cases & Other Tidbits

What doesn't FAT allow?

Mainly *<>\|/:?'

What about whitespace?

Some of these (like tab, line feed, and carriage return) are not valid under FAT and will be removed.

If a sequence of invalid characters surrounded by spaces is in one of the file names, and the remove strategy is being used, then you will be left with multiple whitespace characters in a row. For example,

Really questionable ?? filename

will become

Really questionable  filename

with a double space before filename.

What about invalid UTF-8/UTF-16?

This is removed and replaced with "_INVALID_". This replacement is done before anything else.