Script for finding characters in a folder or file name

Question

I need some help on writing a script that will search thru users folders and files and replace characters in the names with a different character. Our users folders go back to when the users used OS 9 and they used / \ * ? in the file and folder names, I want to write a script that will replace these characters with an _ . Obviously I will need to be logged in as the root user.
The server is OS 10.3.9
Thanks,
Jeff
  Mac OS X (10.3.9)  

Answer 1

Hi Roger,
   There's a flaw in your regular expression and that is the absence of alternation. You want to replace any one of these characters with an underscore. That can be accomplished by putting the characters in a character class. Since the class matches a single character, you'll get an underscore for each.
   Your regular expression only matches a group of all of the characters, side-by-side, in the order you typed them and then it replaces the entire group with a single underscore.
   Oh, there's one other possible flaw. I think that the find utility creates lists of files in relatively large groups and then acts on them. If you change a directory that contains a file you want to change, it's possible that the change to the directory will not be reflected in the path to the file, causing a "file not found" error. A depth first search and acting only on the basename would eliminate that possibility.
Hi Jeff,
   I recommend a command like the following:
find -d /Users -regex ".[\:*?]." -exec echo 'mv "{}" "$(dirname "{}")"/"$(basename "{}" | sed '\''s/[\\:*?]/_/g'\'' )"' \; | sh
That uses the same character class in the -regex option of the find command. That way, nothing will be invoked unless necessary. The method of creating the text of a complex command and using the -exec switch to echo that into a shell is an old trick from O'Reilly's UNIX Power Tools.
   I substituted a colon for a forward slash. As the path separator, the forward slash isn't a valid filename character on a UNIX system. However, old Apple tools, including the Finder, still use a colon as the path separator. Therefore the system presents the allowable character as a forward slash to Apple tools and a colon to UNIX tools. Thus using the colon in the command above will have the effect you want on files that the Finder says has a forward slash in the name.
Gary
~~~~
   James Joyce -- an essentially private man who wished his total
   indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.
         -- Tom Stoppard