Terminal mass rename of files to remove illegal Linux characters

Question

Hi there!
I have hundreds of gigabytes of files I need to copy over to a new Linux server. Unfortunately, Linux does not allow some filename characters that Mac OS X uses.
How can I go through an entire directory and change any file or folder that uses : | ? \ " into a normal hyphen
I've tried shareware renamers like Better File Rename and R-Name, but they are far too slow in scanning my folders. (I've spent hours waiting for them to pre-scan the directories before renaming)
Is there some clever Terminal trick to do this?

Answer 1

The short answer to your question is man bash. You want to write a script which will iterate through your files ( for i in *; do ...), and replace each bad character in each filename ($i) with a hyphen (so something like $j = `echo "$i" | sed s/[:|\?\\\"]/-/` but don't hold me to it because I'm not good at sed; instead, info sed.) Finally, do the rename: mv "$i" "$j" followed by done;. However, this solution, fleshed out, will only do it for top-level files in the given directory. To do it recursively in all subdirectories, etc., you should, inside the first for loop, test if the current item ($i) is a directory and, if so, cd therein and go again, via something like
if [[ -d "$i" ]]; then cd "$i"; scriptname; cd ..; fi;
To summarize:
<pre style="margin-left: 3em">
#!/bin/bash
for i in *; do
if [[ -d "$i" ]]; then
cd "$i";
scriptname;
cd ..;
fi;
#FIXME!
$j = `echo "$i" | sed s/[:|\?\\\"]/-/`;
mv "$i" "$j";
done;
</pre>
TEST FIRST! I HAVE NOT TESTED THIS AND I MAKE NO GUARANTEE THAT THIS WILL ACTUALLY WORK! Make a temporary directory, fill it with good and bad filenames, and make sure what you've written works there! I also haven't thought about how this deals with links and if that is relevant for you. Good luck!