How to remove carriage returns from directory names

filenamesrename

I created a file in Excel and ftp'd the file over to my Linux machine. In the file were a bunch of mkdir commands. Now all of the newly created directories have a carriage return at the end of them. I can find the directories using this command:

find . -type d -name *$'\r'

but when I attempt to remove them using this command:

find . -type d -name *$'\r' | xargs rm-rf

it doesn't work – nothing gets removed. The directories are still there and they still have carriage returns on them.

Can you help me create a command that will remove those pesky '\r's? Thanks.

P.S. I'm using RHEL 5.3

Best Answer

EDITED: forgot to double escape the \r in the sed line

either of these should work for you

for i in $(find . -type d -name '*\r'); do mv "$i" "$(echo $i | sed -e 's/\\r//g')"; done

find . -type d -name '*\r' -exec mv "{}" "$(echo {} | sed -e 's/\\r//g')" \;

this will find all directories named *$\r under your currently directory

it will then mv(rename) them to the same name minus the \r

Related Solutions

Shell – Bulk Rename Files with Special Characters

I guess you see this � invalid character because the name contains a byte sequence that isn't valid UTF-8. File names on typical unix filesystems (including yours) are byte strings, and it's up to applications to decide on what encoding to use. Nowadays, there is a trend to use UTF-8, but it's not universal, especially in locales that could never live with plain ASCII and have been using other encodings since before UTF-8 even existed.

Try LC_CTYPE=en_US.iso88591 ls to see if the file name makes sense in ISO-8859-1 (latin-1). If it doesn't, try other locales. Note that only the LC_CTYPE locale setting matters here.

In a UTF-8 locale, the following command will show you all files whose name is not valid UTF-8:

grep-invalid-utf8 () {
  perl -l -ne '/^([\000-\177]|[\300-\337][\200-\277]|[\340-\357][\200-\277]{2}|[\360-\367][\200-\277]{3}|[\370-\373][\200-\277]{4}|[\374-\375][\200-\277]{5})*$/ or print'
}
find | grep-invalid-utf8

You can check if they make more sense in another locale with recode or iconv:

find | grep-invalid-utf8 | recode latin1..utf8
find | grep-invalid-utf8 | iconv -f latin1 -t utf8

Once you've determined that a bunch of file names are in a certain encoding (e.g. latin1), one way to rename them is

find | grep-invalid-utf8 |
rename 'BEGIN {binmode STDIN, ":encoding(latin1)"; use Encode;}
        $_=encode("utf8", $_)'

This uses the perl rename command available on Debian and Ubuntu. You can pass it -n to show what it would be doing without actually renaming the files.

Find – How to Move or Copy All Files to a Directory with the Same Filename Prefix

It would be a hell to tell find what to do in this case.

Better use the shell:

for i in **/*.{xrt,ini,moo}; do
  FILE=$(basename "$i")
  DIR=~/dst/${FILE%.*}
  echo mkdir -p -- "$DIR"
  echo mv -i -t "$DIR" -- "$i"
done

Use shopt -s globstar to make the ** glob work (or use zsh!). And remove the echos later if the command prints what you want.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Shell – Bulk Rename Files with Special Characters

Find – How to Move or Copy All Files to a Directory with the Same Filename Prefix

Related Question