slugger

A unix filesystem utility to rename files using a restricted url-safe character subset.

Why slug your file paths?

• Avoid bugs and vulnerabilities due to poor handling of problematic characters including spaces, quotes, etc
• Simplify things by sticking with lowercase
• Allow paths to be typed without keyboard gymnastics
• Allow easy tab completion

Usage

Slugger reads filesystem paths from standard input, one per line. In the default mode, it just prints out the slugged versions. If you pass the --rename command line argument, slugger will do the file renames. Typically the input comes from commands that output lists of files like find, ls, etc.

• Preview slugged names without doing anything: find . -type f | slugger
• Do the actual renaming: find . -type f | slugger --rename

How files are renamed

• Convert to lowercase
• Trim leading and trailing whitespace
• Remove repeated dashes
• Do a "unidecode" to translate mostly to ASCII
• Convert all whitespaces to dash
• Delete anything else

Behavior notes

• slugger will not clobber existing files. If the slugged file already exists, it will abort and exit with an error code.
• slugger is safe to run on already-slugged files. It will no-op and exit success (it's idempotent).

How correct and stable is it?

Uh, it has some decent unit tests but it's brand new and should be considered unreliable for now.