How to use linux find command to replace special characters in all file names?

Question

I want to replace all special characters (ie _?:/)(\\-\\n\\t) in all pdf files' name by a space.

I wasn't able to do that so I just tried to remove them using this command.

For some reasons this command works sometimes for a test case, but not for others. It gives error mv: target is not a directory, and also input and target files' name are the same (if no special char to remove).

find .  -name '*.pdf' -exec sh -c 'if="{}"; of=$(echo $if|tr -d '_:-'  ); mv $if $of ;' \;

I expect to change filename:

    a:bc-de_(fg).pdf

To be

    a bc de  fg .pdf

Answer 1

"mv: target is not a directory" is because of the spaces in the file name, and can be fixed by putting file name within double quotes.

Try this

find .  -name '*.pdf' -exec sh -c 'if="{}"; of=$(echo $if|tr "()_:-" " " ); mv "$if" "$of" ;' \;

Answer 2

Alternatively you could use sed:

find . -name '*.pdf' sh -c 'mv "$0" "$(sed "s/[-_:()]/ /g" <<< $0)"' {} \;

sample files:

$ ls
'a:bc-de_(fg).pdf'  'f:sc-de_(fg).pdf' somefile

output files:

$ ls
'a bc de  fg .pdf'  'f sc de  fg .pdf'   somefile

Answer 3

Just more efficient

find ~+ -regextype awk -iregex '.*/[^/]*[-_:()\t][^/]*\.pdf' -exec sh -c 'mv "{}" "`echo "{}"|sed -E "s/[-_:\(\)\t]+/ /g"`"' \;

also does rename such a:bc-_:d to 'a bc d'