Thomas Lindop
50d7189654
> make project outline > tests are definitely wrong > may need to rewrite arg parsing
30 lines
1.3 KiB
Markdown
30 lines
1.3 KiB
Markdown
# Owl
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*The moon is bright. The owls are ready for the hunt.*
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Owl is a command line tool for removing unwanted characters from file names.
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Say you want to backup some of your files on to a memory stick. Most likely
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that memory stick uses `FAT32` or `exFAT` as its file system, as this is the
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most compatible with the most operating systems. But if any of your files
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have special characters like `:` or `?` in their names, this won't work (see
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<https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/win32/fileio/exfat-specification>
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for more details).
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Alternatively, say you have a file that needs to be on an older computer
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that will not render some characters (like multi-character emoji)
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correctly<sup>1</sup>.
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And what if you have either of these problems with potentially many files in
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a directory? Renaming every file would be tedious, and even the best bulk
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renaming tool will struggle to deal with all the possible invalid
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characters, at least if you don't want to manually write a very complex
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[regular expression](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression) every
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time you encounter this problem.
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Owl will hunt down any files with these issues and rename them as
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appropriate - see `man.md` for usage.
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---
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1. Or you just don't like having emoji in a file name.
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