find and delete files with non-ascii names

Question

I have some old migrated files that contain non-printable characters. I would like to find all files with such names and delete them completely from the system.

Exam

Answer 1

It is possible to use PCRE with grep -P, just not with find (unfortunately). You can chain find with grep using exec. With PCRE (perl regex), we can use the ascii class and find any char that is non-ascii.

find . -type f -exec sh -c "echo \"{}\" | grep -qP '[^[:ascii:]]'" \; -exec rm {} \;

The following exec will not execute unless the first one returns a non-error code. In this case, it means the expression matched the filename. I used sh -c because -exec doesn't like pipes.