Change file names with find and iconv

Question

I\'ve tried to change filenames using following script:

find dir/ -type f -exec mv {} $(echo {} | iconv -f UTF8 -t ASCII//TRANSLIT ) \\;

Why doesn\'t it work

Answer 1

I don't know iconv that well, but

 echo ... | iconv ....

is fine for text strings, but if you want you use a filename, certainly you need to specify the file on the right-hand-side of the iconv command line, i.e.

 ls *.files | xargs -I{}  iconv -f UTF8 -t ASCII//TRANSLIT {}

right?

As for moving (mv) a file, you have make sure that the source filename is different from the target filename. It's not clear from you post what you want the target filename to be. If iconv can modify files in-place AND you don't care to keep the original, then I would expect the xargs I provide above should solve your problem.

OR are you saying that the actual filenames contains characters that you want to process with iconv. It might help to edit your post to include sample filenames, before and after iconv processing. Something like this?

find dir/ -type f -exec mv {} $(echo {}.fix | iconv -f UTF8 -t ASCII//TRANSLIT ) \;

For filenames that don't get modified by iconv, you have to have a way to make the name separate from the original filename. So this would be followed by an /bin/rm {} step.

OR see this post How to recursively convert all filenames in folder subtree from UTF-8 to ASCII in Linux .

I hope this helps.