Question

I’ve got a set of files in a web root that all contain special characters that I’d like to remove (Â,€,â,etc).

My command

find . -type f -name '*.*' -exec grep -il "Â" {} \;

finds & lists out the files just fine, but my command

find . -type f -name '*.*' -exec tr -d 'Â' '' \;

doesn’t produce the results I’m looking for.

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

to replace all non-ascii characters in all files inside the current directory you could use:

find . -type f | xargs perl -pi.bak -e 's,[^[:ascii:]],,g'

afterwards you will have to find and remove all the ‘.bak’ files:

find . -type f -a -name \*.bak | xargs rm