Remove non alphanumeric symbols in a file name

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I am looking for a program (preferably freeware or open source) that I could use to rename a file with non alphanumeric symbols in it. I cannot find any on the web where there was a live link; some programs that claimed to do the job failed to rename the file when I tried them. I would appreciate any help/suggestions.

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Have you tried good old DOS?
1. Open a command prompt.
2. Change to the directory where the file lives. cd directoryname
3. Use rename with a wildcard to rename the file. If the file was called “file%$£^&*.doc use this. ren file*.doc file1.doc

cheers, Paul

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Hi Paul,

Thanks for your suggestion; I tried it but DOS is not able to do it. The non alphanumeric symbol in the name is a square in windows and under DOS is an up arrow. So far the applications I have tried to rename the file does not recognize that symbol and they return an error message when they read the name.

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I use a program called Bulk Rename Utility.
I tried some ALT numeric characters like { and × and they worked.

Not sure if it will do what you want.

http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/forum/

Peter.

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Thanks Peter. I will try it and report back.

Regards,
George.

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I ran bulk rename today and got this error message – Error code: The filename, directory name or volume label syntax is incorrect.

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Have you tried the utilities on the Ultimate Boot CD?
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

cheers, Paul

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Hi Paul,

Thanks for your suggestion; I remembered that I had an ultimate boot CD from 2005 but I wanted a more user friendly interface. So I searched my disks and found a UBC4Win disk from 2008. I used that disk to recover the file and saved it to my hd. Thanks again to everyone who suggested different things that ultimately led to a solution.

Best regards,
George.

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