My music library contains many .flac files that need the "?" removed from the filename as my current music player (Sonos) cannot for some reason see those files.
Is there a command or script that would help me find & remove question marks "?" in my music directory?
Directory setup:
~/music/artist/album/01 title with?.flac
Thank you
Open Terminal and change to your directory, then use the command listed to remove all occurrences of ? within your filenames in that directory:
cd ~/music/artist/album/
for f in *; do mv -- "$f" "${f//\?/}"; done
Before you commit to runing the command you can test it, which will show you the original filename followed by new one:
for f in *; do echo -- "$f" "${f//\?/}"; done
-- 01 title with?.flac 01 title with.flac
To do this recursively you'll need to use the find command, and definitely try it in a test directory first. Messing up on the replacement strings of all your filenames could make things far worse than better. For recursive operations such as this I always recommend backing up your data beforehand.
The first command is the dry run, meaning nothing is actually changed. The second command is the real thing, which recursively renames all filenames (eliminating question marks) in the current directory and all sub-directories:
find . -type f -name '*\?*' | while read f; do echo mv "$f" "${f//\?/}"; done
find . -type f -name '*\?*' | while read f; do mv "$f" "${f//\?/}"; done
