? in filename? Blasphemy!

It all started when I got a few files from a friend. He copied them over to my external HDD from linux. I guess linux allows question-mark (?) in file names and so there were a few files with that. The problem was that they wouldn’t get copied to my Windows PC because Windows doesn’t allow ? as part of file names. The worst part was that I could not even rename it – which actually makes sense. The solution? Fire-up your handy virtual machine running linux, connect the external HDD to that, grep for all file names containing ?. Why grep? Coz ? is also a wildcard and so find may not work the way you want. Well, there should be some way to specify the question mark character itself, but I was too sleepy. Anyway, find|grep ? should do the trick. Rename them in linux. Happy Windows.

Live Mesh

So I decided to try out Windows Live Essentials. Live Messenger is really cool – its got facebook integration etc. Problems include not being able to “like” facebook messages, and you cannot play facebook hosted videos directly (youtube, dailymotion and I guess everything else works fine). Nice things include an awesome picture viewer, and really neat interface – along with integrated chat and Live mail. But no gtalk integration – so I cannot switch over just yet – although I really want to leave Gtalk’s old and stale interface behind.

Anyway, the other thing was Live Mesh 2011. Now I guess it started off as a sync utility, but for Vista and Win 7, it gives ANY windows machine remote access capabilities. That is awesome!! Install it on your machine, login via a live account and thats all the configuration. Go to any other machine, login to devices.live.com and your machine should be listed there. Through the browser, you can login and do stuff. The web interface idea is similar to LogMeIn.

The only problem is that the whole thing works on ActiveX on IE. So you cannot use it on a different browser and you also need to install Live essentials / Mesh on the remote system from which you are trying to connect

Maybe silverlight instead?

Copying lots of files

So, I had to copy a lot of files from my external HDD to my local HDD. Lot = 1.2 million files. The thing was in some folder hierarchy and obviously I wanted to preserve all that stuff. Problems

1. Not safe to “move” because in case my experiments go awry, I still want the data to stay on the external HDD. So only looking at copy options.
2. Default right click copy-paste was kind of slow. Or maybe it isn’t, but lets just assume it is.
3. move and copy will on Windows will not work for directories

Solution – XCOPY
Create a folder INTO which you want the contents to come. cd into that folder. Then type

xcopy <path to directory whose contents will get copied. NOTE contents within this dir will be copied> /e /d

Notice the two switches e and d. e forces all directories that do not exist to be created – even if its empty on the external HDD. d is a trick In case you decide to stop the process and carry on later, just Ctrl-C. Later, run the same command again – with /e and /d and copying will resume exactly where it left off. Dont worry about Ctrl-C cutting a large file and that file getting partially copied. It will be deleted on Ctrl-C and will resume from the beginning next time.

EDIT: If you have a LOT of files, it takes a LOT of time to resume coz it needs to check a LOT of files.