Hi Terry,
> > I'd guess apostrophes were in the directory names leading to the
> > files as well as the file's themselves?
>
> I think that would explain it.
I explicitly limited the find(1) to files based on the problem
description and that renaming directories whilst find is trying to
traverse them can upset it. :-)
This slightly more complex pipeline would be one solution.
find -depth -print0 |
xargs -r0 prename -n '1 while s#'\''([^/]*)$#$1#'
We have find do a depth-first traversal so we know that it's finished
with a directory by the time it prints its path. The rename is altered
so it only deletes quotes in the final part of the path, IOW a quote
followed by anything that doesn't contain a slash is replaced by that
"anything". Because this only does one quote yet matches (consumes) to
the end of the string it needs to be done repeatedly in a loop for as
long as it matches. `1' here is the loop's body, it could be 0 for the
glass-half-empties as it's the loop's condition's side-effect we want.
An alternative to the loop would be a zero-width positive look-ahead
assertion in the pattern as that wouldn't consume to the end of the
string; I learnt Perl before they existed so that may explain my
picking the loop. Probably
... prename -n 's#'\''(?=[^/]*$)##'
All of this assumes nothing has a name that's solely single quotes. :-)
Cheers, Ralph.
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