Ubuntu Manpage: convmv - converts filenames from one encoding to another

NAME

       convmv - converts filenames from one encoding to another

SYNOPSIS

       convmv [options] FILE(S) ... DIRECTORY(S)

OPTIONS

-f ENCODING
specify the current encoding of the filename(s) from which should be converted

-t ENCODING
specify the encoding to which the filename(s) should be converted

-i interactive mode (ask y/n for each action)

-r recursively go through directories

--nfc
target files will be normalization form C for UTF-8 (Linux etc.)

--nfd
target files will be normalization form D for UTF-8 (OS X etc.).

--qfrom , --qto
be more quiet about the "from" or "to" of a rename (if it screws up your terminal
e.g.). This will in fact do nothing else than replace any non-ASCII character
(bytewise) with ? and any control character with * on printout, this does not affect
rename operation itself.

--exec command
execute the given command. You have to quote the command and #1 will be substituted by
the old, #2 by the new filename. Using this option link targets will stay untouched.

Example:

convmv -f latin1 -t utf-8 -r --exec "echo #1 should be renamed to #2" path/to/files

--list
list all available encodings. To get support for more Chinese or Japanese encodings
install the Perl HanExtra or JIS2K Encode packages.

--lowmem
keep memory footprint low by not creating a hash of all files. This disables checking
if symlink targets are in subtree. Symlink target pointers will be converted
regardlessly. If you convert multiple hundredthousands or millions of files the memory
usage of convmv might grow quite high. This option would help you out in that case.

--nosmart
by default convmv will detect if a filename is already UTF8 encoded and will skip this
file if conversion from some charset to UTF8 should be performed. "--nosmart" will
also force conversion to UTF-8 for such files, which might result in "double encoded
UTF-8" (see section below).

--fixdouble
using the "--fixdouble" option convmv does only convert files which will still be
UTF-8 encoded after conversion. That's useful for fixing double-encoded UTF-8 files.
All files which are not UTF-8 or will not result in UTF-8 after conversion will not be
touched. Also see chapter "How to undo double UTF-8 ..." below.

--notest
Needed to actually rename the files. By default convmv will just print what it wants
to do.

--parsable
This is an advanced option that people who want to write a GUI front end will find
useful (some others maybe, too). It will convmv make print out what it would do in an
easy parsable way. The first column contains the action or some kind of information,
the second column mostly contains the file that is to be modified and if appropriate
the third column contains the modified value. Each column is separated by \0\n
(nullbyte newline). Each row (one action) is separated by \0\0\n (nullbyte nullbyte
newline).

--preserve-mtimes
modifying filenames usually causes the parent directory's mtime being updated. This
option allows to reset the mtime to the old value. If your filesystem supports sub-
second resolution the sub-second part of the atime and mtime will be lost as Perl does
not yet support that.

--replace
if the file to which shall be renamed already exists, it will be overwritten if the
other file content is equal.

--unescape
this option will remove this ugly % hex sequences from filenames and turn them into
(hopefully) nicer 8-bit characters. After --unescape you might want to do a charset
conversion. This sequences like %20 etc. are sometimes produced when downloading via
http or ftp.

--upper , --lower
turn filenames into all upper or all lower case. When the file is not ASCII-encoded,
convmv expects a charset to be entered via the -f switch.

--dotlessi
care about the dotless i/I issue. A lowercase version of "I" will also be dotless
while an uppercase version of "i" will also be dotted. This is an issue for Turkish
and Azeri.

By the way: The superscript dot of the letter i was added in the Middle Ages to
distinguish the letter (in manuscripts) from adjacent vertical strokes in such letters
as u, m, and n. J is a variant form of i which emerged at this time and subsequently
became a separate letter.

--help
print a short summary of available options

--dump-options
print a list of all available options

DESCRIPTION

convmv is meant to help convert a single filename, a directory tree and the contained
files or a whole filesystem into a different encoding. It just converts the filenames, not
the content of the files. A special feature of convmv is that it also takes care of
symlinks, also converts the symlink target pointer in case the symlink target is being
converted, too.

All this comes in very handy when one wants to switch over from old 8-bit locales to UTF-8
locales. It is also possible to convert directories to UTF-8 which are already partly
UTF-8 encoded. convmv is able to detect if certain files are UTF-8 encoded and will skip
them by default. To turn this smartness off use the "--nosmart" switch.

Filesystem issues
Almost all POSIX filesystems do not care about how filenames are encoded, here are some
exceptions:

HFS+ on OS X / Darwin

Linux and (most?) other Unix-like operating systems use the so called normalization form C
(NFC) for its UTF-8 encoding by default but do not enforce this. Darwin, the base of the
Macintosh OS enforces normalization form D (NFD), where a few characters are encoded in a
different way. On OS X it's not possible to create NFC UTF-8 filenames because this is
prevented at filesystem layer. On HFS+ filenames are internally stored in UTF-16 and when
converted back to UTF-8, for the underlying BSD system to be handable, NFD is created.
See http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1173.html for defails. I think it was a very
bad idea and breaks many things under OS X which expect a normal POSIX conforming system.
Anywhere else convmv is able to convert files from NFC to NFD or vice versa which makes
interoperability with such systems a lot easier.

JFS

If people mount JFS partitions with iocharset=utf8, there is a similar problem, because
JFS is designed to store filenames internally in UTF-16, too; that is because Linux' JFS
is really JFS2, which was a rewrite of JFS for OS/2. JFS partitions should always be
mounted with iocharset=iso8859-1, which is also the default with recent 2.6.6 kernels. If
this is not done, JFS does not behave like a POSIX filesystem and it might happen that
certain files cannot be created at all, for example filenames in ISO-8859-1 encoding. Only
when interoperation with OS/2 is needed iocharset should be set according to your used
locale charmap.

NFS4

Despite other POSIX filesystems RFC3530 (NFS 4) mandates UTF-8 but also says: "The
nfs4_cs_prep profile does not specify a normalization form. A later revision of this
specification may specify a particular normalization form." In other words, if you want to
use NFS4 you might find the conversion and normalization features of convmv quite useful.

FAT/VFAT and NTFS

NTFS and VFAT (for long filenames) use UTF-16 internally to store filenames. You should
not need to convert filenames if you mount one of those filesystems. Use appropriate
mount options instead!

How to undo double UTF-8 (or other) encoded filenames
Sometimes it might happen that you "double-encoded" certain filenames, for example the
file names already were UTF-8 encoded and you accidently did another conversion from some
charset to UTF-8. You can simply undo that by converting that the other way round. The
from-charset has to be UTF-8 and the to-charset has to be the from-charset you previously
accidently used. If you use the "--fixdouble" option convmv will make sure that only
files will be processed that will still be UTF-8 encoded after conversion and it will
leave non-UTF-8 files untouched. You should check to get the correct results by doing the
conversion without "--notest" before, also the "--qfrom" option might be helpful, because
the double utf-8 file names might screw up your terminal if they are being printed - they
often contain control sequences which do funny things with your terminal window. If you
are not sure about the charset which was accidently converted from, using "--qfrom" is a
good way to fiddle out the required encoding without destroying the file names finally.

How to repair Samba files
When in the smb.conf (of Samba 2.x) there hasn't been set a correct "character set"
variable, files which are created from Win* clients are being created in the client's
codepage, e.g. cp850 for western european languages. As a result of that the files which
contain non-ASCII characters are screwed up if you "ls" them on the Unix server. If you
change the "character set" variable afterwards to iso8859-1, newly created files are okay,
but the old files are still screwed up in the Windows encoding. In this case convmv can
also be used to convert the old Samba-shared files from cp850 to iso8859-1.

By the way: Samba 3.x finally maps to UTF-8 filenames by default, so also when you migrate
from Samba 2 to Samba 3 you might have to convert your file names.

Netatalk interoperability issues
When Netatalk is being switched to UTF-8 which is supported in version 2 then it is NOT
sufficient to rename the file names. There needs to be done more. See
http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/2.0/htmldocs/upgrade.html#volumes-and-filenames and the
uniconv utility of Netatalk for details.

BUGS

       no bugs or fleas known

AUTHOR