I was copying some music files (flac, mp3) from a linux ext4 volume onto a removable ssd connected via USB. I was getting a lot of errors because the filenames had extended characters and question marks in, and the USB drive didn't like that.

As these are music files that are sucked into a player, the filename isn't particularly important - the artist and trackname are picked up from embedded metadata. So I wanted to tidy the filenames and wondered if there was a simple way to do this.

There is - a command called detox.

 detox -s iso8859_1 -r -v -n /tmp/new_files

will show the changes that will happen - remove the -n to do the changes for real.

References

• https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/en/man1/detox.1.html