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chnames.sh

Screenshots

This bash script I originally wrote when I wanted to rename lots of files which contained not only spaces, umlauts, and accented characters, but also all sorts of adventurous characters such as () [] {} <> ; : ' & + and several more. You can use chnames.sh with any file and directory names as long as they are encoded in UTF-8, ISO-8859-1 or ASCII.

chnames.sh can ...

• rename files and directories by substituting certain characters and character strings according to predefined rules. This can be done for single files, whole directories, or also recursively.
• perform pure test runs, which only tell you what the names looked like if they would be renamed.
• create log files containing the names before and after renaming.
• generate an undo script which enables you to undo all the changes.
• simply check whether there are undesirable characters in any names (= all except: A-Z a-z 0-9 ~._-).

Substitution rules

On renaming chnames.sh performs the following substitutions:

Character	Becomes
() [] {} <>	-
space	_
Ä Ö Ü ä ö ü ß	Ae Oe Ue ae oe ue ss
+ &	_and_ (= default), or: _und_ (with -g)
°	_deg_ (= default), or: _Grad_ (with -g)
: ;	.
,	If followed by space: _ Else: .
' " ` ´ ? ! ^ # * ¿ ¡ ,	Are removed.
accented characters	Become characters without accent: ÀÁÂÃÅ - A àáâãå - a Æ - AE æ - ae ÇĆĈĊČ - C çćĉċč - c ÈÉÊË - E èéêë - e ÌÍÎÏ - I ìíîï - i Ñ - N ñ - n ÒÓÔÕØ - O òóôõø - o ŚŜ ŞŠ - S śŝşš - s ÙÚÛ - U ùúû - u Ý - Y ýÿ - y ŹŻ Ž - Z ź żž - z
several of: space - _ . ~	Are reduced to one character.
- at the beginning	Is removed.

Important note

chnames.sh will only work correctly when run in a UTF-8 shell. The script itself contains characters outside of the ISO-8859-1 range, and therefore has to remain UTF-8 encoded!

If your system does not use UTF-8 yet but you would like to make use of chnames.sh anyway, here you will find some brief information.

Dependencies

• sed
• iconv
• less
• UTF-8 terminal
• bash (at least version 3)

Downloads

chnames.sh is licensed under the GNU General Public License. It is placed to your free disposal according to the terms of the GPL. More detailed information you can find on http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html, or in the file COPYING enclosed with the script.

Incidentally, the German version of this script you can find here.

For testing purposes here you can also download an archive containing weird but possible file names:

Screenshots

Pure check	Renaming	Undo script
Extra check

Short information on UTF-8

• Provided that the locale you intend to use is installed, you canstart an xterm using a command like

  LANG=de_US.UTF-8 xterm or
  LANG=de_GB.UTF-8 xterm

  For the unicode characters to be displayed correctly, of course an appropriate unicode font has to be installed (ISO-10646). If even so an xterm does not display all of the characters contained in the substitution table, using another terminal might be a solution. I really like working with urxvt (= rxvt-unicode).
  The above-mentioned command works fine for other programmes such as konsole, or gnome-terminal too.

• The command "locale" shows you the current locale environment.
  With "locale -a" you get a list of all locales installed.

• Useful tools:

  • convmv
    With this you can conveniently convert filenames to UTF-8, even recursively through many directories.
  • iconv, recode
    Both of these programmes are designed to convert file contents from and to various encodings.
  • file
    This programme most times is able to recognize file encodings properly.

• Links:

  • UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ for Unix/Linux by Markus Kuhn
  • The Unicode HOWTO by Bruno Haible
  • Wikipedia: UTF-8