[sworthy]

I just received my lacie porsche external drive (awesome by the way) but while backing up my mp3's it stops when it gets to a song with a question mark in the title (which occurs more than you think it would). I tested my ipod (as an external drive) and it has this same limitation. How can I transfer these files without manually renaming each offending file?

[bri-guy]

You should be able to do this using the terminal. Open a terminal window, type "cp" drag and drop the source folder into the terminal window, and then drag and drop the disk/folder you are copying to. Press enter. This should work...

I created a file with a question mark and tried dragging and dropping into the terminal. It correctly escaped the question mark, so this leads me to believe that it should work just fine. Then again, I seemed to be able to copy this test file all over the place using the finder.

[car1son]

What program are you using it for your backups? ( and what format is the new hard drive formatted in? HFS+?)

The question mark "?" character is one of those special characters to the Unix command line (it's a wild card that matches a single character.) it would be easy enough to make a programming mistake. However, Finder seems to handle it properly.

By the way, you don't have to manually rename files, if it comes to that. In /Library/Scripts/Finder Scripts folder you'll find a "Replace Text in Item Names" script that can do a bulk rename of all files in a folder. Version tracker also lists scripts like A Better Finder Rename.