Hi all,

I have a Linux server (Gentoo) that receives input from users' systems.

For each input, a small text file is created based on the request e.g. REQ_2355.20080313.DAT). The 2355 is a category and REQ is a key meaning REQUEST.

It works fine until users miskey in Chinese or other weird chars; the filenames would be something like ???REQ_????2344.20080313????.DAT or __---REQ---.DAT.

I would like to have a script that detects such weird names and rename the files to maybe archive1.DAT, archive2.DAT etc. (if there are more than these weird filenames).

Also I have come across filenames that begin with a hyphen ('). These files I find it even to rename manually.

Please assist.

While all these can be renamed manually, I have been losing sleep (a lot of these things seem to happen in the wee hours).

Thanks in advance.

Eric

Are you looking for such a script in bash or perl or ...? There are many options for this; one you may be interested in is 'sed' which is a program that replaces characters, words, whole paragraphs even, depending on what you tell it to do.

You should look up "regular expressions" while you're at it -- that is the language that sed (and grep, and many other invaluable tools) use to help understand exactly what you want it to find.