Clean Up Filenames with detox

📅 December 7, 2024
“No, this is not a health diet.”

Have you ever perused the filenames of documents non-techie people have created only to see them splattered with weird characters, spaces, quotes, punctuation, and other potentially problematic sentences?

For script-writing command-line warriors, filenames, such as “Untitled ‘(Future Update[s])’ Document.txt” or “**IMPORTANT**.txt” or “(Secret/Hide) My Notes!.odt”, that contain characters best omitted can induce cringe and frowns at the problems certain characters — or even spaces by themselves — can create when processed by scripts.

If you have to rename these files by hand, you might find yourself wishing others were more tech-savvy and wishing that you had a tool to help you out.

“Isn’t there an easy way to rename files by removing or replacing problematic characters in filenames?”

Yes, there is! The command-line program detox is freely available from the Ubuntu repository and can make life easier.