I am often dealing with folders with lots of files with weird file names. Spaces, capital letters, and so on, often cause problems. Instead of manually fixing such file names, here is a quick one-liner (found here) that can be run in the terminal (at least on Ubuntu) to solve the problem: rename 'tr/ A-Z/-a-z/' -- * It is based on a simple regular expression, replacing any spaces with hyphens, and changing any capital letters to lower case.

Even though I have been running Ubuntu as my main OS for more than a year now, I am still trying to figure out a good workflow. One thing I have been missing from my former OSX setup was the ability to quickly and easily prepend the date to a number of files. Having moved my files between many different OSes, hard drives, network drives, etc. over many years, I know that the files’ creation dates will break at some point.

Cleaning up on my hard drive, I came across a couple of .wks (MS Works spreadsheet) documents from 1994-95. I don’t really need to get at the contents of these files right now, but I think it could be useful to be able to open them at some point. So I tried to see if I could open them with any of the office programs I have on my computer (MS Office, Numbers, OpenOffice, NeoOffice).