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I’ve been looking for a solution to a problem that a friend of mine has, with a bunch of files spread across several different folders which as gotten some really nasty characters in their file names, most likely because they used to reside on a windows partition.


While searching for a solution I came across this one app called detox which worked perfectly, and here is how I did it:

cd /path/to/folder/with/bad/files
find . -exec detox --dry-run {} \;

This will actually scan recursively, and the –dry-run flag won’t change any thing but it will give you a list of suggested changes, just remove the flag and re-run if you want to execute them.

Hope this could be of some help to others finding themselves in the same boat.