regex - Find files with illegal windows characters in the name on Linux

Question

I have a projects on my Linux box that contains file with characters that are considered illegal/reserved in Windows (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247%28VS.85%29.aspx). The project has over 10,000 files across several folders and I'll to identify the path for these files.

I can find . -name "*?*" for each of the illegal/reserved characters, but is there an easier way to find all files that contain < > : " / | ? *

Once I've identified, I would like to remove all such characters from each of these files.

Answer 1

This find one-liner should work for you:

find . -name "*[<>:\|?*]*" -exec bash -c 'x="{}"; y="$(sed "s/[<>:\|?*]+/-/g" <<< "$x")" && mv "$x" "$y" ' ;