Arch Linux

meph

Member

Registered: 2011-06-06

Posts: 160

[SOLVED] Filename filtering

On my external harddrive I only use upper/lower case letters, numbers, dashes, underscores and dots, to maintain 100% compatibility accross computers and operating systems. The problem is that occasionally I put in by mistake a file that contains a different character, for example a space, accented letter, exclamation mark, single quote, you name it, and I need to find them. Manually specifying those characters I don't want there is unacceptable, there's so many of them that it's nearly impossible to remember them all. What I need is some sort of inverse filtering, where the ok filenames would remain hidden, and 'invalid' names would show.

Any ideas?

Last edited by meph (2012-04-02 18:57:42)

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Running arch is like raising a puppy - if you spend a bit of time with it each day and do just a bit of training you'll end up with the most loyal partner you could want; if you lock it in a room and don't check on if for several days, it'll tear apart your stuff and poop everywhere.

aesiris

Member

Registered: 2012-02-25

Posts: 97

Re: [SOLVED] Filename filtering

"find" can match regular expressions:

find "$dir" ! -regex "$dir"'/[a-zA-Z0-9._-]*'

and you can normalize names with "tr":

find "$dir" ! -regex "$dir"'/[a-zA-Z0-9._-]*' | tr -dc "[a-zA-Z0-9._\-\n/]"

mr.MikyMaus

Member

From: disabled

Registered: 2006-03-31

Posts: 285

Re: [SOLVED] Filename filtering

use something like

find | egrep -v '^[-a-zA-Z0-9._/]+$'

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What happened to Arch's KISS? systemd sure is stupid but I must have missed the simple part ...

... and who is general Failure and why is he reading my harddisk?

meph

Member

Registered: 2011-06-06

Posts: 160

Re: [SOLVED] Filename filtering

Thank you both, took a little bit from both of you. Don't know why I didn't realize you could give such an extensive strings to grep, also fixing names via tr is helpful.

So thanks again

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Running arch is like raising a puppy - if you spend a bit of time with it each day and do just a bit of training you'll end up with the most loyal partner you could want; if you lock it in a room and don't check on if for several days, it'll tear apart your stuff and poop everywhere.

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: [SOLVED] Filename filtering

'locate' instead of 'find' would be quicker, but be sure to run 'updatedb' first and adjust which parts of the system are excluded from the locate database.