Discussion on:

How to remove weird characters from file and directory names automatically

You can also use 'detox *' or 'detox -r *' for recursive fixing. Unfortunately it also translates the accents from other languages (which may require option '-s iso8859_1' or '-s utf-8' to work correctly). Always test first with a dry-run (option -n).

When I first wrote this script, it was because I had never heard of detox (in spite of several searches I did make for name cleaning command line utilities). When I discovered it, I kept using my script, because it's more portable and flexible. It uses utilities surely available on every Linux distributions; it also fixes directory names, something that (at least, according to its own man page) detox doesn't do. Finally, if you know just a little bit of Perl you can rename files in any way you can put in a regular expression (for example this_is_ME_iN_1998.JPG??? to This_Is_Me_In_1998.jpg???) , which you can't with detox

Thanks for mentioning it, though!

Marco

If you mounted a drive out of someone's windows machine on your Linux system, would this script work to clean up file names on the ntfs partition?

The worst naming conventions I see are done by windows users.

I tried detox, and I tried this script.
(am I confused, or is harder than it ought to be to copy-paste? this isn't BASIC, so why are there line numbers?)

Someone sent me a tar.Z file that contained some bad files.

ls -b output here:
\177
\177\177\177\030\030\030\030
ls -l
1057 Oct 8 16:30 ?
1058 Oct 8 16:03 ???????

The script posted here just leaves them as is.

detox gives some odd graphics and says the files already exist.
Cannot rename lib/??? to lib/: file already exists
Cannot rename lib/????????????????????? to lib/: file already exists

I manually moved them with
mv ? one_bad_character
mv ??????[!c] seven_bad_characters
(because there happened to be another file with seven characters that ended in c)

--
clarence

... it makes it easier for me to point to several parts of the scripts, but you must remove them if you cut and paste the script code above into a file ! Sorry that this wasn't clear.

Hi
I copied the code above, removed the line numbers and saved the file with the .sh extension.
I tried using it but can't get it to change any file names.
Could someone tell me how to run the script?

Masarin,

have you realized that the code in this page doesn't change file names but only generates another file with the commands to change those names, and that is that second file that you must run?

This said, in general these are scripts that you must run from a linux command line, that is from the textual interface of programs like konsole or Gnome Terminal. You must run the script with the code in this page by giving to it the name of the top folder that contains the files and other folders you want to sanitize. For example, if that folder is /home/masarin /weirdfiles and you saved the code in a file called scriptname.sh, you should type a command like this at the prompt:

#> scriptname.sh /home/masarin/weirdfiles

you should also make the script executable first, with this other command:

#> chmod 755 scriptname.sh

this will generte what I called clean_tmp_files_2. and that is the file you must run to change names
If you have already done this, please describe with more details what is happening and pass some examples of file names that don't change

HTH,
Marco

"have you realized that the code in this page doesn't change file names but only generates another file with the commands to change those names, and that is that second file that you must run?"

Ok I got it now . I did not realize this.

Another q. do you run the commands in the second file (clean_tmp_files_2) one by one in the konsole window, or can you run them automatically?