Unix Find Replace Special Characters in Multiple Files

Question

I've got a set of files in a web root that all contain special characters that I'd like to remove (Â,€,â,etc).

My command

find . -type f -name '*.*' -exec grep -il "Â" {} \;

finds & lists out the files just fine, but my command

find . -type f -name '*.*' -exec tr -d 'Â' '' \;

doesn't produce the results I'm looking for.

Any thoughts?

Solution 1

I would recommend looking into sed. It can be used to replace the contents of the file.

So you could use the command:

find . -type f -name '*.*' -exec sed -i "s/Â//" {} \;

I have tested this with a simple example and it seems to work. The -exec should handle files with whitespace in their name, but there may be other vulnerabilities I'm not aware of.

Solution 2

Use

tr -d 'Â' 

What does the ' ' stands for? On my system using your command produces this error:

tr: extra operand `'

Only one string may be given when deleting without squeezing repeats.

Try `tr --help' for more information.

Solution 3

sed 's/ø//' file.txt

That should do the trick for replacing a special char with an empty string.

find . -name "*.*" -exec sed 's/ø//' {} \

Comments

[Schoffelman]

The '' was just to throw the character into quotes, replacing it with nothing

[Alberto Zaccagni]

tr -d 'Â' just deletes, I think it's fine with what you need, or am I missing something?

[Schoffelman]

sorry, the results I'm looking for is to have the special character deleted.

[ghostdog74]

useless use of cat -- sed 's/ø//' file.txt

[user224243]

Okay, did not think that someone uses spaces in filenames in a linux environment. But you right, it's a point. I will add a correction to my post.

[Schoffelman]

With both Grundlefleck's & the solution above I get a sed: 1: "./index.html": invalid command code . Checking to see if I have a sys/environment setting that needs to be changed - but I don't think that's it

[Schoffelman]

I was able to get this one to work with a few additional flags find . -type f -name '.' -exec sed -i "s/Â//gi" {} \;

[Admin]

I would upvote for the nice "trick" (however it was not a question about moving files around).