I have a directory filled with a lot of files, some of which have brackets in them; e.g. a(file).ext,an(other)file.ext, etc. My goal is to rename them into something like this: a_file_.ext or an?other?file.ext. (doesn't matter what character).
the reason for this is because certain console applications can't deal with these brackets and think it's some kind of command.
things I already tried:
$ rename ( ? *(*
$ for f in *(*; do mv $f ${f//(/?}; done
$ for f in "*(*"; do mv $f ${f//\"(\"/\"?\"}; done
and the like. It could be that I'm not understanding these rename functions. (I do know that these only work for "(" and that I have to do them again for ")") So could someone also give some more explanation about it's syntax and why it won't work?
All in Bash.
Consider:
(shopt -s nullglob; for f in *[\(\)]*; do mv "$f" "${f//[()]/_}"; done)
( and ) are syntax, and need to be escaped to be unambiguously referred to as literals.nullglob option makes the glob expand to nothing at all, rather than itself, if no files match. Putting the code in a subshell prevents this configuration change from persisting beyond the single command.