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Bash script to traverse directory tree and rename files

I'm decommissioning a Mac OS X server which hosts a stack of files and directories with file names that contain illegal chacters. I need to sort the file names out before I can move the files.

I'm after a bash script that will traverse all the subdirectories within a given directory, and for each directory and file contained within, remove any space characters at the beginning or end of the directory/file name and replace any illegal characters with an alternative character, say an underscore or hyphen?

I think the code below is the beginning of what I'm after but...
- it doesn't deal with files names that have leading/trailing spaces
- it doesn't handle directories
- it only works on the files in one folder
- it only matches one illegal character ("/" in this eg.) (I'm not familiar with useage of sed to know if it can be used to match & replace multiple alternative chars)
- don't know if trying to match "/" will work because won't "ls /" list the root directory? Can I use "\/"?

Code:

#!/bin/bash



illegal=/

replace=_



for i in $( ls *$illegal* );

do

src=$i

tgt=$(echo $i | sed -e "s/$illegal/$replace/")

mv $src $tgt

done

Python alternative(only files):

Code:

import os

illegal = list('''!"#$%&\'()*+,/:;<=>?@[\\]^_`{|}~ ''')

repl = "_"

for root,dir,files in os.walk(os.getcwd()):

        for fi in files:

                for ill in illegal:

                        if ill in fi:    

                                print "found ",  os.path.join(root,fi)                        

                                newname = fi.replace(ill,repl)

                                os.rename( os.path.join(root,fi) , os.path.join(root,newname) )

Output:

Code:

linux:# /test/python test.py

found  /test/test .dat

found  /test/test'.dat

Quote:

Originally Posted by intramaweb

Code:

#!/bin/bash



illegal=/

replace=_



for i in $( ls *$illegal* );

do

src=$i

tgt=$(echo $i | sed -e "s/$illegal/$replace/")

mv $src $tgt

done

What I'd like to know is how you manage to create a file with
a / in the name. I reckon you'll have SERIOUS problems getting
rid of that, because for anything command-line based it's going
to look like a partial path ... and of course, it won't be there.

Cheers,
Tink

It is my experience that files that look like "foo/bar" from the graphical portion of OS X appear as "foo:bar" in the shell. I've never tried really hard to break this... but I would assume that it works the same way everywhere.