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Software Review of:
Two file renaming utilities

From the June, 2000 issue of PC Alamode Magazine
by Susan Ives
Web servers — and other persnickety devices — can be arrogant about what kind of file names they find acceptable. Just as the Internet, downloadable music, digital cameras and a host of other neat stuff were making the scene, Windows 95/98 decided to let us all name our files whatever we darned well pleased. No more eight-character limitations on file names! Use spaces! Use capital letters! But we won’t recognize them, nyah, nyah, nyah! 

I had a client give me a Zip disk full of digital photos, all with long file names that contained both spaces and upper case letters. My new upgrade of Adobe Photoshop 5.5 allows me to make a web page photo gallery just by pointing and clicking on a directory name. This I did — I do love automation — but it didn’t work. Why? The web server hiccuped at the spaces in the file names. 

The obvious solution was to go into file manager, right click on 70 file names, one-by-blasted-one, and rename all of the files to replace the naughty spaces with underlines or dashes. Hey — I’ll do menial work at $70 an hour. But I didn’t have to. I found some shareware that did the drudgework for me. 

Space-B-Gone
Space-B-Gone eliminates the spaces in file names. What was listed in your file directory as Picture of a Cow.jpg becomes Picture_of_a_Cow.jpg. No big deal, unless you have 75 files that need amending. Open up the program, point to the directory where the errant files reside and go for it. You can pick your own replacement character — maybe a dash instead of an underline — and limit the file type that you want changed — only .jpg or .mp3, for example. Push a button and the entire directory is cleaned up in a minute or two. Easy as pie. 

Get the free program at 

To Lower Case
Some programs and devices burp when confronted with capital letters. To Lower Case works in much the same way as Space-Be-Gone. Open up the program, navigate to the directory that contains the offending files, click on the start button and with a matter of seconds every capital letter in every file name is changed to lower case. Picture_of_a_Cow.jpg becomes picture_of_a_cow.jpg. 

You can get To Lower Case at 

On that one project alone, these two free utilities saved my about an hour of boring work. 

Susan Ives designs web pages.