Find and replace folder and file names with Windows incompatible characters
By David Jones •
My Ubuntu (18.04) drive is synchronised with a Windows drive. Some of my folder and file names in Ubuntu contains characters not allowed in Windows and this causes issues during sync. I want to find these characters and either remove them from the file/folder names or replace these characters by an "x". This needs to be done recursively across the folder/directory tree.
How can I do this quickly?
Here are the characters forbidden in Windows (modified from Christopher Oezbek's answer):
< (less than)
> (greater than)
: (colon - sometimes works, but is actually NTFS Alternate Data Streams)
" (double quote)
\ (backslash)
| (vertical bar or pipe)
? (question mark)
* (asterisk)1 Answer
Try rename, you need to install it first.
sudo apt-get install renameBelow is an example, you can change * to where your file/folder located.
~$ ls
'1<.txt' 3:.txt '5\.txt' '7??.txt'
'2>.txt' '4"d".txt' '6|.txt' '8*.txt'
~$ rename -v 's/[?<>\\:*|\"]/x/g' *
1<.txt renamed as 1x.txt
2>.txt renamed as 2x.txt
3:.txt renamed as 3x.txt
4"d".txt renamed as 4xdx.txt
5\.txt renamed as 5x.txt
6|.txt renamed as 6x.txt
7??.txt renamed as 7xx.txt
8*.txt renamed as 8x.txt
~$ ls 1x.txt 2x.txt 3x.txt 4xdx.txt '5x.txt' 6x.txt 7xx.txt 8x.txt
