Question

I’m trying to remove songs via a bash shell for loop yet removing a file like this

while read item; do rm "$item"; done < duplicates

keeps getting caught up on song name. Is it possible to get around this? My song titles might look like this:

/home/user/Music/Master List's Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music/John\ Mayer/Room\ for\ Squares\ \[Aware\]/07\ 83.m4a
/home/user/Music/Master List's Music/bsg\ season\ 1\ \(Case\ Conflict\ 1\)/06\ A\ Good\ Lighter.mp3
/home/user/Music/Master List's Music/Nino\ Rota/The\ Godfather\ Pt.\ 3/14\ A\ Casa\ Amiche.m4a

as you can see, in order to remove an item I can have no %.()[] or anything else without being escaped unless it’s the . before the file extension obviously. Is there a way I can escape special characters like this?

For instance, I used sed to turn the %20 into spaces:

cat duplicates | sed 's/%20/\\ /g' > clean_duplicates

The output I’m looking for looks like this:

/home/user/Music/Master\ List\'s\ Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/John\ Mayer/Room\ for\ Squares\ \[Aware\]/07\ 83.m4a
/home/user/Music/Master\ List\'s\ Music/bsg\ season\ 1\ \(Case\ Conflict\ 1\)/06\ A\ Good\ Lighter.mp3
/home/user/Music/Master\ List\'s\ Music/Nino\ Rota/The Godfather\ Pt\.\ 3\/14\ A\ Casa\ Amiche.m4a

Answer 1

Update To address the actual url-decoding (I missed it before):

while read line; do printf "$(echo -n $line | sed 's/\\/\\\\/g;s/\(%\)\([0-9a-fA-F][0-9a-fA-F]\)/\\x\2/g')\n"; done < input

Output:

/home/user/Music/Master List's Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/John Mayer/Room for Squares [Aware]/07 83.m4a
/home/user/Music/Master List's Music/bsg season 1 (Case Conflict 1)/06 A Good Lighter.mp3
/home/user/Music/Master List's Music/Nino Rota/The Godfather Pt. 3/14 A Casa Amiche.m4a

So in order to delete those files, e.g. redirect the cleaned output to a file:

while read line
do 
    printf "$(echo -n $line | sed 's/\\/\\\\/g;s/\(%\)\([0-9a-fA-F][0-9a-fA-F]\)/\\x\2/g')\n"
done < duplicates > cleaned_duplicates

while read file; do rm -v "$file"; done < cleaned_duplicates

If you prefer to store the names into a script files using explicit shell character escaping you could do

while read file; do printf "rm -v %q\n" "$file"; done < cleaned_duplicates > script.sh

Which should result in script.sh containing:

rm -v /home/user/Music/Master\ List\'s\ Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music/John\ Mayer/R
rm -v /home/user/Music/Master\ List\'s\ Music/bsg\ season\ 1\ \(Case\ Conflict\ 
rm -v /home/user/Music/Master\ List\'s\ Music/Nino\ Rota/The\ Godfather\ Pt.\ 3/