automatorcommand linefinderscript
I need an Automator script which finds all files with illegal Windows characters like <>:/\\|?* and replaces these characters with an underscore. The rest of the filename should remain unchanged.
As an alternative, I would use a terminal script. I know how to find them with find . -name "*[<>:/\\|?*]*", but I don't know how to change the names properly.
How do I do this?
There is no need for dedicated file renaming software to do such relatively simple batch renaming operations – Automator will allow you to create services that do what you want.
Your first task (removing a numerical prefix followed by an underscore form file names) can be solved like this:
Add a “Run Shell Script” action and make sure it runs /bin/bash and takes its input “as arguments”. Insert the following code:
shopt -s extglob
for f in "$@"; do
fpath="${f%/*}"
fname="${f##*/}"
mv "$f" "$fpath"/"${fname/#+([[:digit:]])_/}"
done
– see the Bash Reference Manual’s chapter on Pattern Matching for an explanation of how this works (recommended reading for this kind of operation anyway :)).
save to the default location as “Remove Prefix”.
– you will now have a “Remove Prefix” in the Service menu of Finder (and the context menu of files and folders) which will rename files so a numerical prefix followed by an underscore is stripped from the file name.
The second task (prefixing the files with a selectable string) is even easier to achieve, using a Standard Automator action:
– when you run the service on one or more files, you will see the following dialog:
(or rather, its equivalent in your system language), where you can edit the prefix you want to use before applying it.
Happy renaming with OS X’ on-board abilities :).
The Automator Actions you want are:
For the shell script, copy and paste in:
use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Basename;
use File::Find;
find(sub {
return if (-d $File::Find::name);
my($filename,undef,undef) = fileparse($_,qr/\.[^.]*/);
print $filename."\n";
}, shift);
You can use the New TextEdit Document action if you want the resulting file list to appear in TextEdit but not saved to disk.
To learn more about using Automator, see Apple's Mac Basics: Automator.
Best Answer
I found a bash one-liner that finds each file and folder with invalid characters in the name and renames the file/folder, changing each invalid character to a dash:
It is possible that a file has an illegal name that would be corrected to the exact same legal name as another illegally named file (Example: two files named "fle"). The one-liner above will not change the name of the second (or further) illegally named file that would be corrected to the same name as the first. This means that you may still have some illegally named files after the one-liner runs. After you run this one-liner, run
again to identify any illegally named files that still exist. One way to deal with this situation is to change the dash in the sed substitution to another character, e.g. underscore, and run the one-liner again.