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Asked: 2026-05-12T12:52:53+00:00

I have a script that records files with UTF8 encoded names. However the script’s

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I have a script that records files with UTF8 encoded names. However the script’s encoding / environment wasn’t set up right, and it just recoded the raw bytes. I now have lots of lines in the file like this:

.../My\ Folders/My\ r\303\266m/...

So there are spaces in the filenames with \ and UTF8 encoded stuff like \303\266 (which is ö). I want to reverse this encoding? Is there some easy set of bash command line commands I can chain together to remove them?

I could get millions of sed commands but that’d take ages to list all the non-ASCII characters we have. Or start parsing it in python. But I’m hoping there’s some trick I can do.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    In the end I used something like this:

    cat file | sed 's/%/%%/g' | while read -r line ; do printf "${line}\n" ; done | sed 's/\\ / /g'

    Some of the files had % in them, which is a printf special character, so I had to ‘double it up’ so that it would be escaped and passed straight through. The -r in read stops read escaping the \‘s however read doesn’t turn "\ " into " ", so I needed the final sed.

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