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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting share a shell script which can replace weird characters in directory or file name Post 302607156 by methyl on Tuesday 13th of March 2012 08:23:50 PM
Old 03-13-2012
Thank you for sharing this script. It is an interesting approach to the problem.

Personally I would avoid letting the Shell see the funny filenames by avoiding the use of Shell Environment Variables and using temporary files instead. Similarly if I really need to use "sed" (not "tr") then I'd compose the "sed" commands in a "sed" file where Shell can't see them.

I have a local problem with commercial software which can create files with any name - including screen control escape sequences and absolutely anything a user can type on a keyboard.
The script to deal with this rationalises the filename before any "old files" cleanup sees the file. It also "corrects" any filenames starting with a hyphen character (for obvious reasons) and deletes any file consisting totally of garbage characters and/or space characters.
The reasoning behind the script is to stop the "old files" cleanup failing or executing dubious "rm" statements by renaming or removing files with dodgy names before running the cleanup.
 

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MKMANIFEST(1)						      General Commands Manual						     MKMANIFEST(1)

NAME
mkmanifest - create a shell script to restore Unix filenames SYNOPSIS
mkmanifest [ files ] DESCRIPTION
Mkmanifest creates a shell script that will aid in the restoration of Unix filenames that got clobbered by the MSDOS filename restrictions. MSDOS filenames are restricted to 8 character names, 3 character extensions, upper case only, no device names, and no illegal characters. The mkmanifest program is compatible with the methods used in pcomm, arc, and mtools to change perfectly good Unix filenames to fit the MSDOS restrictions. EXAMPLE
I want to copy the following Unix files to a MSDOS diskette (using the mcopy command). very_long_name 2.many.dots illegal: good.c prn.dev Capital Mcopy will convert the names to: very_lon 2xmany.dot illegalx good.c xprn.dev capital The command: mkmanifest very_long_name 2.many.dots illegal: good.c prn.dev Capital > manifest would produce the following: mv very_lon very_long_name mv 2xmany.dot 2.many.dots mv illegalx illegal: mv xprn.dev prn.dev mv capital Capital Notice that "good.c" did not require any conversion, so it did not appear in the output. Suppose I've copied these files from the diskette to another Unix system, and I now want the files back to their original names. If the file "manifest" (the output captured above) was sent along with those files, it could be used to convert the filenames. SEE ALSO
arc(1), pcomm(1), mtools(1) local MKMANIFEST(1)
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