remove newline and tab characters from filename

oliveoyl · 02-10-2021, 10:52 AM

Hello,

I've got some files that have \n and \t characters in the filenames that I'd like to remove.

This works great for the first newline:

rename $'\n' '' FILE*

I can run this again to remove the next new line but is it possible to capture multiple newlines with one command?

How to remove tabs? How to remove both at once?

# ls -lb
T1\tThisFileNameHas\tTabs
N1\nThisFileNameHas\nNewlines
TN1\tThis\nFileName\nHas\tTabsandNewlines

boughtonp · 02-10-2021, 11:13 AM

There'll be dozens of different ways to do this - one option is to use parameter expansion in the shell to replace the unwanted characters with a safer one.

For example, this creates a badly named file, fixes the filename, then renames it:

Code:

orig_filename=$'TN1\tThis\nFileName\nHas\tTabsandNewlines'
echo test > "$orig_filename"
new_filename="${orig_filename//[$'\t'$'\n']/-}"
mv --no-clobber "$orig_filename" "$new_filename"

Both newline and tab characters are replaced with the value between / and }" in the penultimate line - in the above example, a single hyphen - but you could remove that to have the characters removed instead. The double slashes // makes it change all occurrences instead of just the first.

The --no-clobber option to mv prevents any existing files being overwritten if there is a naming collision. (Allowing you to choose a different replacement string to avoid that collision).