A Collection of Useful Scripts and Tools for the Command Line

Sanitise Filename

For keeping files consistently named.

• Replaces special characters, non-printing characters, whitespace etc. and produces a Capitalised_Snake_Case filename.
• Some replacements are designed to show what was replaced, e.g. & becomes _and_ for readability.
• Others just remove characters altogether, e.g. filename_.ext becomes filename.ext.
• Extensions and the dirname are not modified (by default) so you can safely do mv -u file $(sanitise_filename file) for renaming.
• Relies on the boost regex library and makes use of modern C++23 features

Mvsan

A bash script that renames your files and folders automatically using the sanitise_filename program to do the string manipulation.

• Pass -k|--keepcase to preserve the original case of your filenames.
• The script calls sanitise_filename with -n (no extension) for directories so that mvsan * etc. work as expected.
• The mv command used internally is called with -n so files won't be overwritten if a sanitised filename conflicts with an existing file.