Mass filename changes using terminal? How?

Question

Hello,
I recently put a Linksys NAS on my network. Unfortunately, the EXT3 format used on the disks does not like filenames with special characters such as "/" or "?". So I cannot copy files from my PowerBook to the NAS with these characters in their names.
A search of my hard drive shows 800+ files with these forbidden characters.
Is there a way to use terminal (or any aspect of OS X) to do a mass change of these characters to a more acceptable character (i.e. changing all instances of "/" to "-")?
Thanks for the help.
Jim

Answer 1

Jim
tcsh: Invalid null commandAh, you're using tcsh. Bad news! I'm sure it could be made to work, but I've switched to bash because it is better for this sort of stuff. Gary will tell you to switch to zsh, but for now bash will do. I just tried the command as posted and tcsh complained loudly!
First point: often when you try to copy/paste from a browser window, you get an extra space appended to the line. It often doesn't matter, but it could here (may explain the "tcsh: Invalid null command" message). So copy the commands into a TextEdit document, which you have changed to Plain Text from the Format menu. Then be sure not to include any trailing space.
Second point, we'll scrap the use of sudo since it is only your Home directory that you are interested in.
Third point: as I said, we'll use bash. The prompt will change to a '$' instead of a '%'. When you've finished, you can return to tcsh with a plain exit command.
So, copy and paste the following into the Terminal window, one line at a time, with a return after each line:
<pre>bash
find -d ~/Documents \( -name "?" -o -name ":" \) -exec echo 'mv "{}" `echo "{}" |
sed -e "s^\?^_^g" -e "s^:^-^g" ` ' \; | sh</pre>This should work—it did for me!
Note:
it returned a > prompt with nothing else on the line.It will do this after the second line above—it is an invitation to complete the command