Good morning everyone!
I just had a question on how to go about the age-old problem of having files created on a unix-like system (Linux, Mac etc.) that need to be shared with a Windows machine. Specifically, some tiles of the e-books and manga have “?” and “:” in the (and possibly some other reserved characters). Sadly, Syncthing has no solution for this and just creates an error on the Windows machine where my e-book library is shared.
What is an easy, semi-automatic solution for renaming files to allow portability between operating systems? Ideally I would like to create a shell script that I can just run on a folder that will recursively descend through the directory structure.
Thank you in advance :)
jdnewmil@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
Bash scripts tend to use transformation programs that accept input through standard input and use the output from standard output. For replacing one character with another, the “tr” program is typically used.
To operate on the command-line arguments to a program like “mv”, bash allows you to use back-tick quotes.
Note the use of escaped backslashes… the pair represents a single charcter. Be sure to study the manual for each command (e.g.
man tr) before using it at first.Te experiment building this kind of complicated command, replace the “mv” with “echo” to see what the two constucted arguments will be, and switch back to “mv” when they look right.
One approach to looping is to turn the above into a script that fixes one filename specified as an argument to the script ($1 inside the script) and then interactively pipe all the filenames through xargs to give them one at a time to your script.
find topdir -typr f | xargs -d "\n" yourscriptnameYou must try this on sample data and also backup your current data before turning your script loose on it… so often there are little things that don’t behave the way you expect when some unexpected input interacts with your script.
Finally, there are scripting languages like Python that have a lot of these capabilities built in… and with more consistent syntax than the many-tools bash approach, but they can have the headache of a lot more specialized setup requirements than just bash to go along with those advantages.