TR Forums

Sometimes, when I have weird characters in the filename, this happens:

andrewchiw@makinami /Volumes/TOURO/music/Minecraft - Volume Alpha $ ls
ls: 09 - Oxygène.mp3: No such file or directory
ls: 10 - Équinoxe.mp3: No such file or directory
01 - Key.mp3 14 - Clark.mp3
02 - Door.mp3 15 - Chris.mp3
03 - Subwoofer Lullaby.mp3 16 - Thirteen.mp3
04 - Death.mp3 17 - Excuse.mp3
05 - Living Mice.mp3 18 - Sweden.mp3
06 - Moog City.mp3 19 - Cat.mp3
07 - Haggstrom.mp3 20 - Dog.mp3
08 - Minecraft.mp3 21 - Danny.mp3
11 - Mice on Venus.mp3 22 - Beginning.mp3
12 - Dry Hands.mp3 cover_front.jpg
13 - Wet Hands.mp3

I can't open tracks 9 and 10, but apparently the filesystem knows about them? Are they there are not?

They are there but it's having problems with the non-ascii characters. What's the filesystem type and options? And what do you want to do beyond 'ls'?

It's an exFAT, and the machine is a Mac. So UTF-16 encoded filenames. Shouldn't be anything wrong, right?

I want to open them too! Not rename them though.

Wikipedia says that ExFAT supports Unicode UTF-16 characters so you should be good to go.

You say this is on a Mac rather than a Unix box so I;'ll move this over to the Apple Sanctuary forum and someone there may know.

I'm not much of a Mac guy, but in my experience (mostly Windows and Linux) Unicode in file names is a major PITA even if the underlying file system technically supports it. Unicode in file/directory names confuses tools and applications, resulting in situations like the one you've encountered here where 'ls' apparently knows the file is there, but doesn't know what to do with it.

My recommendation is to rename the files so that they contain only characters from the 7-bit ASCII character set, but preserve the original Unicode track names in the meta-data. That way, at least you'll limit the potential breakage to tools that explicitly display or manipulate MP3 meta-data. (And in my experience, Unicode in media file meta-data actually tends to be handled fairly well in most cases.)

Hopefully 'mv' can deal with the Unicode names. Otherwise, you'll need to write a short C program to do the rename for you.

Or simply rename it in the GUI.

bthylafh wrote:

Or simply rename it in the GUI.

If the GUI doesn't choke on it too. I went with CLI since the OP used CLI in his example.

Just for kicks, I wonder if a symlink would work? Since you don't want to rename the file... reference it with a symlink.