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I have a bunch of files (around 900) that have some special characters.

Some of the files contains example, and quoting "[useless] filename (something)" so what I want is just to strip the brackets and parenthesis, some are folders, others are text files

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Debian comes with a program called prename which can rename files using regexes:

prename 's/^\[.+?\] *//; s/ \(.+?\)$//' *
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Use -v for verbose and -n to preview the results (and do nothing). This way you can check the result first. – Geoff Mar 23 '11 at 19:50
thanks a lot you two :) – allenskd Mar 23 '11 at 22:51
sorry, my regex skill sucks so I ask.. there are some files with brackets parenthesis on both sides, but that code only removes the starting line :( – allenskd Mar 24 '11 at 21:10
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