Question/review my script: removing bad chars from filenames
The task: remove undesirable characters from filenames.
Restrictions: Must use basic RE, base utilities (non-GNU) and /bin/sh (ash). No ksh, zsh, perl, etc.
Below is what I've come up with. It seems to work OK but I'm open to shorter, more efficient alternatives.
Inside the square brackets I've included an assortment of chars I'd like to remove. But I'm not able to get the following chars inside the square brackets so that they are also removed:
- square brackets
- single quotes (apostrophes)
One solution is to pipe into another sed. But I'd like to avoid that. My version of sed does not accept hex or octal.
Note: I have tried the "while read" approach but I found that the read builtin required filenames that do not contain illegal characters for variables, such as parentheses.
Hi there,
I'm pretty new to UNIX and have tried trawling through this forum to find an answer to what I want to try to do, which I'm sure is very simple but I don't know how to do it.
What I have a a folder that contains multiple files that I have copied from Windows and I want to remove the... (5 Replies)
How do I remove non-printable characters from all txt files and output the results to one file?
I've tried the following:
tr -cd '\n' < *.txt > out.txt
and it gives ambiguous redirect error.
How can I get it to operate on all txt files in the current directory and append the output to... (1 Reply)
I'm using a script with a lot of SED commands, in conjunction with grep, cut, etc. I've come up against a wall with a particular road block:
I output a file from an SVN registry that gives me a list of files. The list consists of a variable number of lines that contain a path/file. The paths... (4 Replies)
I have a problem mounting images because of the spaces in the filenames. Does anyone know how to rename files by removing the spaces with the find command?
find Desktop/$dir -name "*.dmg" -print -exec ??? (4 Replies)
I have the following files in the same directory but if you look at the od
output you can see one of the files has and "\n" as part of the file
name.
Is there a way I can only remove the file with the "\n" as part of the
file name without affecting the other file.
I was thinking about... (4 Replies)
I'm trying to move a large folder to an external drive but some files have these weird chars that the external drive won't accept.
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Dear community,
maybe I'm asking the moon :rolleyes:, but I'm scratching my head to find a solution for it. :wall:
I have a file called query.out (coming from Oracle query), the file is like this:
ADDR TOTAL
-------------------- ----------
TGROUPAGGR... (16 Replies)
Running SunOs 5.6. Solaris.
I've been able to remove all special characters from a fixed length file which appear in the first column but as a result all subsequent columns have shifted to the left by the amount of characters deleted.
It is a space separated file. Line 1 in input file is... (6 Replies)
Hi all,
I'm using iconv command to change files encoding to UTF-8
If my input file has chars as those are removed creating the file without those special chars.
I tried using iconv -c, but there is still the removal.
Is there a way to keep those special chars changing just the... (6 Replies)
Hi Team,
I have a file a1.txt with data as follows.
dfjakjf...asdfkasj</EnableQuotedIDs><SQL><SelectStatement modified='1' type='string'><!
The delimiter string: <SelectStatement modified='1' type='string'><!
dlm="<SelectStatement modified='1' type='string'><!
The above command is... (7 Replies)
Discussion started by: kmanivan82
7 Replies
LEARN ABOUT POSIX
regex
regex(1F) FMLI Commands regex(1F)NAME
regex - match patterns against a string
SYNOPSIS
regex [-e] [ -v "string"] [ pattern template] ... pattern [template]
DESCRIPTION
The regex command takes a string from the standard input, and a list of pattern / template pairs, and runs regex() to compare the string
against each pattern until there is a match. When a match occurs, regex writes the corresponding template to the standard output and
returns TRUE. The last (or only) pattern does not need a template. If that is the pattern that matches the string, the function simply
returns TRUE. If no match is found, regex returns FALSE.
The argument pattern is a regular expression of the form described in regex(). In most cases, pattern should be enclosed in single quotes
to turn off special meanings of characters. Note that only the final pattern in the list may lack a template.
The argument template may contain the strings $m0 through $m9, which will be expanded to the part of pattern enclosed in ( ... )$0 through
( ... )$9 constructs (see examples below). Note that if you use this feature, you must be sure to enclose template in single quotes so
that FMLI does not expand $m0 through $m9 at parse time. This feature gives regex much of the power of cut(1), paste(1), and grep(1), and
some of the capabilities of sed(1). If there is no template, the default is $m0$m1$m2$m3$m4$m5$m6$m7$m8$m9.
OPTIONS
The following options are supported:
-e Evaluates the corresponding template and writes the result to the standard output.
-v "string" Uses string instead of the standard input to match against patterns.
EXAMPLES
Example 1: Cutting letters out of a string
To cut the 4th through 8th letters out of a string (this example will output strin and return TRUE):
`regex -v "my string is nice" '^.{3}(.{5})$0' '$m0'`
Example 2: Validating input in a form
In a form, to validate input to field 5 as an integer:
valid=`regex -v "$F5" '^[0-9]+$'`
Example 3: Translating an environment variable in a form
In a form, to translate an environment variable which contains one of the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 to the letters a, b, c, d, e:
value=`regex -v "$VAR1" 1 a 2 b 3 c 4 d 5 e '.*' 'Error'`
Note the use of the pattern '.*' to mean "anything else".
Example 4: Using backquoted expressions
In the example below, all three lines constitute a single backquoted expression. This expression, by itself, could be put in a menu defini-
tion file. Since backquoted expressions are expanded as they are parsed, and output from a backquoted expression (the cat command, in this
example) becomes part of the definition file being parsed, this expression would read /etc/passwd and make a dynamic menu of all the login
ids on the system.
`cat /etc/passwd | regex '^([^:]*)$0.*$' '
name=$m0
action=`message "$m0 is a user"`'`
DIAGNOSTICS
If none of the patterns match, regex returns FALSE, otherwise TRUE.
NOTES
Patterns and templates must often be enclosed in single quotes to turn off the special meanings of characters. Especially if you use the
$m0 through $m9 variables in the template, since FMLI will expand the variables (usually to "") before regex even sees them.
Single characters in character classes (inside []) must be listed before character ranges, otherwise they will not be recognized. For exam-
ple, [a-zA-Z_/] will not find underscores (_) or slashes (/), but [_/a-zA-Z] will.
The regular expressions accepted by regcmp differ slightly from other utilities (that is, sed, grep, awk, ed, and so forth).
regex with the -e option forces subsequent commands to be ignored. In other words, if a backquoted statement appears as follows:
`regex -e ...; command1; command2`
command1 and command2 would never be executed. However, dividing the expression into two:
`regex -e ...``command1; command2`
would yield the desired result.
ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
| ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
|Availability |SUNWcsu |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
SEE ALSO awk(1), cut(1), grep(1), paste(1), sed(1), regcmp(3C), attributes(5)SunOS 5.10 12 Jul 1999 regex(1F)