deblank - remove special characters from filenames

deblank is a command line tool (written in Ruby) that renames files and replaces or removes special characters like spaces, parentheses, or umlauts. The new filename will only contain the following characters:

A-Z a-z 0-9 . _ -

Spaces are replaced by underscores, German umlauts and eszett are transliterated, all other invalid characters are removed.

Examples

Use the program as shown in the examples below.

• deblank "no space (and parentheses) allowed.txt"

  renames the file to no_space_and_parentheses_allowed.txt

• deblank "path with spaces/schrödinger.jpg"

  renames the file to path with spaces/schroedinger.jpg

• deblank -n "no space.txt"

  no-act mode, only shows what would happen

• deblank -l

  lists the used character substitutions

Installation

You can either

• use gem install deblank to install from RubyGems.org,

• copy lib/deblank.rb under the name deblank into your search path,

• clone or download the repository and use [sudo] rake install on a Linux machine to install deblank and its man page to /usr/local.

Requirements

• Ruby must be installed on your system.

• No additional Ruby gems are needed to run deblank.

• deblank has been tested with Ruby 3.1 or higher on Linux and on Windows (command prompt with code page 850).

Documentation

Use deblank --help to display a brief help message.

If you installed deblank using rake install you can read its man page with man deblank.

Known problems

With the Windows command prompt, depending on the used character code page there might occur problems due to misinterpreted encoding of command line arguments.

Reporting bugs

Report bugs on the deblank home page: https://github.com/stomar/deblank/

License

Copyright © 2012-2024 Marcus Stollsteimer

deblank is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 or later (GPLv3+), see www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.