RE: filename-changing application

["Sherman, Bryan" <BSherman -at- synchrony -dot- net>]

One quick warning, don't know if this is still an issue, but a few years
back the company I worked for got a nice job trying to recover files that
were blown away by this technique.

The problem was the user used the wildcard like this "del *99.xls". Problem
is that DOS treated (not sure if it still does) the first * as "any
characters up to the period". So this was equal to "del *.xls", poof all
their Excel Worksheets were gone.

Back in my DOS Days I ALWAYS checked the wildcard by doing a "dir *99.xls"
to see what it actually will pull up. Underlying moral is to always back up
before doing something drastic like this.

I once used a utility to do this, can't remember the title, but if you go
to:
http://www.zdnet.com/downloads/
and look for "rename utility" in PC Downloads there is a whole host of
shareware utilities.

-----Original Message-----
From: Halter, Meg [mailto:HalterMC -at- navair -dot- navy -dot- mil]
Sent: Thursday, April 27, 2000 12:47 PM
To: TECHWR-L
Subject: RE: filename-changing application


Assuming all the files are in just a few directories, file manager is great
for this because it supports wildcard renaming. Unfortunately, it's been
hidden in the last several releases of windows. In WinNT, you can find it at
C:\WINNT\system32\WINFILE.EXE. In Win98, it's in C:\Windows. Once you've
opened it, go to the directory containing the offending files.  Open file >
rename, type in the old and the new names (for example *.tmp and *.tmp3) and
let 'er rip. As far as I know, you'll have to repeat the process for each
directory.

Another possibility would be to use the DOS rename command. It also supports
wildcards, possibly in the directory as well as the file name. Can't vouch
for this, because I haven't tried it.

Hope this helps. 

-- Meg