Greetings all,

Quick question. I have been ripping cds and such and some of the tracks have questions marks in them and other "not so good in a file name" characters. Because of this, during the encoding process, instead of having a nice file name I have something like

M98765~v.ogg

Does anyone know of a way to actually run a find and have it pick up the grave (~) character?

I would like to rename these files (and directories) to something a more...how would you say....human readable :P.

In bash, the '~' character is a shortcut for your home directory. If you need a literal '~' character, then you have to escape it with a backslash: '/~'. The same goes for most other "illegal" filename characters, such as parentheses, quote marks, exclamation points, and especially spaces.

Also, don't forget tab-completion. Hitting the tab key when typing a filename will autofill whatever names it sees that match what you've already typed. It can often help when matching those oddball characters.

When using a file with illegal characters in a command, you can either use the backslash-escape as above, or enclose the whole filename in quotation marks so that bash will see the thing as single unit.

I suggest you get in the habit of keeping your filenames clean. Use underscores or hyphens instead of spaces, and leave out illegal characters as much as possible. It will save you some frustration. I also personally keep most of my filenames in lowercase letters only, since Linux is case-sensitive, but that's not strictly necessary.

in bash
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Oh, and there's a nice perl rename command (it should be available if you have perl installed) that's handy for cleaning up file names. It uses the same substitution syntax as sed. I've been having fun learning how to use it recently.

rename "s/~/-/g" *

...will replace all the tildes in filenames with simple hyphens in the current directory.