rename character "â" of directory name?

Question

I'm trying to rename rename character â of directory name to be blank. For example, directory with name how-â8093-to.

This is the command I use, including some other modification

find . -type d | xargs rename 's/â//'

but still not works.

Answer 1

When using find to operate on files you should always try to use the -exec function rather than xargs wherever possible because it will side-step a lot of potential issues with argument quoting. Particularly in the case of file names with weird characters, this is very important.

Try the following command:

find . -type d -name '*â*' -execdir rename 'â' '' {} \;

This will find everything just the way you were before except it will use find to also filter by name for only files that have â in the name (since it would be pointless to run the rename command on non-matching files) and then run rename on them each individually from the directory where they are found.

Answer 2

Are you just trying to remove that character from one file and can't do it? Can you type mv how-tabhow-8093-to or mv how-?8093-to how-8093-to?

Answer 3

You can try to work-around using complement character classes, e.g.:

find . -type d | xargs rename 's/[^A-Za-z0-9 ]//'

However, on a Ubuntu 10.04 system I can't reproduce your issue with your example filename and rename. Perhaps something is wrong with your perl installation or locales?

Answer 4

I do not know how version of rename (I am using util-linux version) are you using but on my Fedora 15 works with:

rename 'â' '' how-â8093-to

From rename manual:

NAME
   rename - Rename files

SYNOPSIS
       rename from to file...
       rename -V

DESCRIPTION
       rename will rename the specified files by replacing the first occurrence of from in their name by to.

I cannot read anything about the sed like syntax you are using.