last: 20160518

AFP FAP FAP (Apple File Protocol Filenames and Pathnames Fix and Preserve) is a mass renamer for the mess the switch AFP -> SMB left on our fileservers.

It will be a tool we will use to cleanup some problem/oddities that currently block people's work.

As Apple unilaterally dropped AFP support from their operating system, a switch from AFP:https:// based file sharing to SMB:https://became more and more urgent and we finally made that campus-wide on April 11 2016.
Unfortunately, as soon as lot of you started to use the new SMB:https:// protocol, strange things began to happen, mainly:

• permission-related issues when navigating files
• empty folder that you know aren't empty

Since none of those errors is really true server side (eg. we didn't loose any of your data, we didn't loose control on permission flows), we took some time to analyze the situation in order to collect a matrix of causes for those issues.

What we have found is a few things we have to fix with stored data. Some problems are machine generated (metadata, system files), others are user-made poor choices (slashes in file names, multiple files w/ same name and different amount of trailing spaces ...)

Here is the matrix:

Following cleaning actions will be taken:

• trailing, leading spaces => removed, 'file ' will become 'file'
• slash in filename => become underscore, 'file/name' will become 'file_name'
• trailing, leading dot => become a real dot, ':2efile' will become '.file'
• :2eDS_Store files => DELETED (because useless ATM)