Question

0

remove certain special characters from file names

rated 0 times [ 0] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 2078 / 3 Years ago, wed, september 1, 2021, 1:38:25

I am having an issue transferring folders to my external hard drive- I dont want to change formatting on the HD.

So there are 100's of files in the folder, and the error preventing me from copying them is coming from special characters (I dont know exactly which, but I believe its "|" and "." and Im sure there are others. I've been manually renaming/removing these, but it's a pain.

Open to suggestions, but I "guess" im looking for a way to either remove those specific characters from the file name, (would doing that cause an issue with .m4a etc?) , or replace them with an underscore if necessary. The one lead I have is perl rename, but I didnt try this yet.

rename 'y/|/_/' *
like this?

thanks for any suggestions

Answers

Only authorized users can answer the question. Please sign in first, or register a free account.

homerurhyth

Add To Favorites

Follow

Total Points: 338

Total Questions: 113

Total Answers: 105

Location: Moldova

Member since Sat, Aug 6, 2022

2 Years ago

homerurhyth questions

1 apt-get update not working in Ubuntu 20.04 WSL1

Thu, Mar 2, 23, 00:55, 1 Year ago

1 gnome-text-editor always crashes because I opened a binary file with session restore enabled

Wed, Jun 29, 22, 17:42, 2 Years ago

1 How can I delete specific string from a file

Sat, Jun 18, 22, 00:54, 2 Years ago

1 Screen Share Not working in Ubuntu 22.04 (In all platforms zoom, teams, google meet, anydesk , etc.,)

Tue, May 17, 22, 21:05, 2 Years ago

1 How to configure policies/preferences for Chromium

Wed, Dec 29, 21, 15:39, 2 Years ago

View All

answered 3 Years ago nalystcul · Accepted Answer

Yes the (Perl-based) rename command is a good candidate for this. You can add the -n or --nono option to trial-run the replacements ex.:

   -n, --nono

           No action: print names of files to be renamed, but don't rename.

so for example

$ rename -n 'y/|./__/' *|*

rename(foo|bar.baz, foo_bar_baz)

rename(foo|bar|baz, foo_bar_baz)

Note that rename will not let you destructively overwrite files if their names are not unique:

$ rename -v 'y/|./__/' *|*

foo|bar.baz renamed as foo_bar_baz

foo|bar|baz not renamed: foo_bar_baz already exists

Note that . is not a special character in the context of filenames so I'd suggest not actually replacing that.