Rename otherwise-truncated files

Factual Questions
1

I am burning a CD with lots of long-winded file names and several layers to the file tree. The program tells me that there is a limit of 64 characters that may be in a name, which includes the slashes and folder name of the file address.

Poor planning has left me with tons of files with names such as “Bulletin Boards/Straight Dope Message Board/September General Questions Rename otherwise-truncated files.doc” This will be truncated to “Bulletin Boards/Straight Dope Message Board/September General Qu~.doc”

What I would like to do is abbreviate some of the more common words, such as Sept or GQ in the example above. If it were only 10 or 30 files, I’d just suck it up and rename them each individually. But it’s hundreds of files.

Is there an easy way to do this, in the same way you’d use Find and Replace in MS Word? By the way, it’s Win 98 and some Adaptec CD burning program.

2

Here’s one way to do it. Open an MSDOS window, navigate to the directory, and run a DIR command and redirect the output to a file like this:

dir > dirfile.doc

You can then edit this to create a RENAME statement for each file. When you’re done editing, rename dirfile.doc to dirfile.bat and run it.

Alternatively, I understand the FOR statement in a MSDOS batch file might be useful in this situation, but I know next to nothing about it. See the MSDOS help file for information.