BSD - Remove non-ascii characters from all files in a directory recursively

Rename can do this..

try something like

find dir -depth -exec rename -n 's/[^[:ascii:]]/_/g' {} \; | cat -v

you may need the cat -v to properly display any weird characters without your terminal getting screwed.

if that prints acceptable substitutions change the -n to -v.

That said, it sounds like the charset on your filesystem is wrong(mount -o utf8 ?), since this sort of thing should really work...

This is a one correct way to apply recursively:

find . -depth -execdir rename 'y/[\:\;\>\<\@\$\#\&\(\)\?\\\%\ ]/_/' {} \;

change all of this symbols for underscore. Be carefull, is considering all white spaces.

why it works? take this test:

mkdir test

cd test

mkdir -p a$/b$/c$/d$ f%/g%/h%/i% j%/k%/l%/m%

find . -depth -execdir rename 'y/[\:\;\>\<\@\$\#\&\(\)\?\\\%\ ]/_/' {} \;

ls -R

(as you can see, all files were changed)

Use convmv to convert the file names if they are really incorrectly encoded. You should prefer mounting the filesystem with the correct encoding in the first place.