Shortening File Names

EagleFiler
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1

Apologies again for monopolizing the forum–I’m doing a lot of workflow rearranging. (And replies from people other than Michael are welcome!)

I’d planned to move my Eaglefiler library from Dropbox to OneDrive, but there’s a bug in Onedrive: If it hits a filename larger than 256 words it crashes and has to be re-installed. It identifies only the file that caused the immediate crash.

Is there a script or other way of shortening file names in an Eaglefiler library before attempting the OneNote installation?

2

What do you mean by “256 words”? The Mac file system only supports 255 characters.

3

Sorry, typo. 256 characters. The problem–which is all over the Windows help boards–is that OneDrive basically implodes when it hits a file name that large. It doesn’t just fail to sync but crashes and requires re-installation.

I don’t know if this conflicts with what the wikipedia article says, but I have some extraordinarily long file names in Eaglefiler–for example, Amazon websites converted to pdf that include long descriptions of the product. I have so many files that checking them manually would be arduous.

I don’t know if Dropbox is syncing these files or not, but it doesn’t crash (across Windows and Mac).

4

On a Mac, each file/folder name can be up to 255 characters. For OneDrive, I just found this page, which states that the entire path must be fewer than 255 characters:

The entire path, including the file name, must contain fewer than 255 characters. Shorten the name of your file or the name of subfolders in OneDrive, or select a subfolder that’s closer to the top-level folder.

So shortening the filenames by script would help—and I can look into writing a script—but you may need to adjust your folder hierarchy as well.

There are also some filenames that are not allowed:

Change its name so that it doesn’t begin or end with a space, end with a period, or include any of these characters: / \ < > : * " ? |

These names aren’t allowed for files or folders: AUX, PRN, NUL, CON, COM0, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, LPT0, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, LPT9

There are some similar issues with Dropbox for Windows, and there’s a script to adjust the filenames.

5

Yes, I already use that script! I should invest in learning Applescript, so I can do this stuff myself.

But it does seem like Onedrive should do something other than crash when it hits a problematic filepath. It makes me leery of Onedrive.

6

Agreed. Here’s a Shorten Path script that will try to rename files to get them under the OneDrive limit.

7

Wow, thanks. I look forward to trying it out. I think I’ve done enough wrestling with OneDrive for one week!

(I’d be curious to hear other people’s reactions to OneDrive. If I can get past this issue, the $100 yearly for Office 365 seems like a better deal than paying for Office AND DropBox. But DropBox has been flawless and fast.)

8

Unlike Dropbox, it looks like OneDrive does not support Mac file metadata.