This is a head scratcher.

I need to move these three oddly-named files from an external 2.5″ SSD to my desktop. The file names were intended to have variables replaced date info, however, clearly they did not. So I’m left with these filenames that MacOS seems to want to interpret rather than treat as a string. I wish it was as easy as tossing in single quotes or escaping chars, but so far, that hasn’t worked.

Files: Test01-$(internal:date_y)-$(internal:date_m)-$(internal:date_d)-.mp4 Test01-$(internal:date_y)-$(internal:date_m)-$(internal:date_d)-0001.mp4 Test01-$(internal:date_y)-$(internal:date_m)-$(internal:date_d)-0002.mp4

I’m on MacOS. In the Finder, the files are not visible. But they are not hidden files.

In Terminal, however, when I navigate to “/Volumes/TestDrive”, then run a quick “ls”, I can see all three files no problem. Including permissions, size, owners, full filename, etc.

However, when I attempt to move the files to my desktop, and rename in the process (even if I don’t rename), Terminal tells me that “No such file or folder can be found” or something very close to that.

I’ve tried using mv and cp commands to put the filename in single quotes so the filename is read literally. Yet, I’m still given feedback that the file cannot be transferred because it cannot be found or doesn’t exist.

mv 'Test01-$(internal:date_y)-$(internal:date_m)-$(internal:date_d)-.mp4' ~/Desktop/Test01-01.mp4' 'cp 'Test01-$(internal:date_y)-$(internal:date_m)-$(internal:date_d)-.mp4' ~/Desktop/Test01-01.mp4

When I try to escape special characters instead of quotes, I am also told the file doesn’t exist. But clearly it does when I list out the contents of the drive. And there’s only 3x .mp4 files, two hiddne files .fseventsd and some spotlight file.

mv Test01-$(internal:date_y)-$(internal:date_m)-$(internal:date_d)-.mp4 ~/Desktop/Test01-01.mp4

I’ve tried copying by inode. No luck. I’ve tried pulling the videos into ffmpeg (CLI based media mgmt tool) to see if I can get some info on the files, and same thing, ffmpeg (or ffprobe) both will tell me the file doesn’t exist…even though I can list the files and see that it does.

I hope I’m missing something obvious, but but it seems all the obvious approaches are not yet working for me.

So my question is, what do I need to do to make these files “exist” so that I can rename them and back them up? Happy to go down any rabbit hole.

Thanks in advance!