You can't rename files that way. The * on the command line gets turned into real file names by bash before they are ever given to the mv command so you are tell the command line to consist of any files with a : followed by any files with an = or -.
At best your command will error out, at worst it will overwrite an existing file.
What you are needing is a program that can take a pattern and rename files with a different pattern. There are 2 that I've used, mmv and rename. Of the 2, you probably have rename on your system already since it gets pulled in with PERL. If not, just install the rename package.

With rename all you have to do is:
rename 's/:/-/' *

That will use a regular expression to change all the files in the current directory that contain a : in their name to the same name with a - replacing the :.

Be very very careful with the rename command, it can and will clobber every file that it touches before you know it just because you got a single character out of place.
When in doubt add the -n option so that it will tell you what it's going to do without actually doing it. Then if everything looks good, run the command again without the -n to actually make the changes.

Brian Cluff

On 01/30/2016 08:29 AM, Michael wrote:

I'm sure that will fix it but what am I doing wrong in my attempts to rename them?

$ mv *:* *=*

mv: target ‘*=*’ is not a directory

$ mv *:* *-*

mv: target ‘darktable-1:9Download’ is not a directory

$ mv *:* ./*-*

mv: target ‘./darktable-1:9Download’ is not a directory

On Sat, Jan 30, 2016 at 10:29 AM, Matt Graham <mhgraham@crow202.org> wrote:

On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 6:45 PM, Michael <bmike1@gmail.com> wrote:

the filesystem is probably FAT because it is a thumb drive....
rsync: mkstemp "/media/bmike1/RedSanDisk/Documents/Education/Darktable/.darktable-1:10WaterLilyEdit.CccL3o" failed: Invalid argument (22)

It is not possible to have a ':' character in a filename on a FAT-based filesystem. This is because that character was used to denote which disk drive a file was on back in the DOS days... "C:\junk\stuff.txt" and so forth.

I am not sure what these hidden files contain, or whether they're actually important. You can pass the "--exclude *\:*" option to rsync to tell it to not try to transfer files that contain ':' characters, which may help.

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