Hot to remove special chars from filenames and rename them in a directory?

Question

This is what I have so far.

#! /bin/bash

cd DirectoryName

for file in *.csv; do
    #echo $file
    filename=${file%.*}
    file_clean=${filename//[ ()$+&\.\-\'\,]/_}
    final= "$file_clean.csv"
    mv "$file" $final
done

cd ..

Answer 1

I would use the following:

#! /bin/bash
cd DirectoryName
for file in *.csv; do
    filename=${file%.*}
    file_clean=`echo $filename | tr -cs "[:alnum:]_" _ `
    final="$file_clean.csv"
    echo "mv \"$file\" \"$final\" "
done
cd ..

The only changes are:

1) There was a space after the = in the line final= "$file_clean.csv". I have removed it.

2) Instead of using the string substitution command I have used the tr command. With tr, the -c option says to replace any character that is not in the set. So I can specify the characters I want to keep (alphanumerics and the underscore, in this case) and all the others will be transformed.

This should match some more special characters that are hard to specify via direct substitution, such as []\{} and ". The -s option means that only one underscore will be generated even if suppressing multiple characters. Thus abc((((())))).csv translates into abc_.csv instead of abc__________.csv