Overview

detox is a program that renames files to make them easier to work with under Unix and related operating systems. Spaces and various other unsafe characters (such as "$") get replaced with "_". ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) characters can be replaced as well, as can UTF-8 characters. More details are contained in the detox.1 man page.

This is a BETA release. Please watch for falling bits.

Compilation instructions

Compilation:

./configure
make

Installation:

make install

Installation that overwrites config files and translation tables:

make force-install

Compilation notes

Ensure that the path to lex/yacc (or an equivalent) is in your $PATH environmental variable. For instance, under Solaris, you may need to add /usr/ccs/bin to your path to get detox to compile:

export PATH=${PATH}:/usr/ccs/bin

To get detox working with long options on Darwin or Solaris (or any other OS without getopt_long in its C library), I've included support for libpopt. Install libpopt and configure with the following:

./configure --with-popt

If you've installed libpopt in a directory other than /usr, which is likely, you'll want to specify the base path to libpopt. So, if popt.h is in /usr/local/include, you'll run configure like so:

./configure --with-popt=/usr/local

Runtime Notes

The most important option to learn is -n, aka --dry-run. This will let you run detox without actually changing any files, so that you can get an idea of what detox is all about.

The simplest way to run detox is to just run it on a directory containing files that need work:

detox xfer_files/

You can also just to specify the filename:

detox my\ bad\ file.txt

You can also specify recursion (this works best on directories):

detox -r /music/transferred_from_elsewhere/

Other Notes

This project was initially developed under Linux (RedHat 7.x, 8.x), and is presently being maintained under the FreeBSD 5.x series. If you run into any problems with installation or operation please feel free to contact me.

Bugs

None known at the moment.

Special Thanks

Many thanks to Miguel Angelo Rozsas for suggesting UTF-8 support and his valuable input following that suggestion. This change helped introduce translation tables into detox.

Ciaran McCreesh put together a package for Gentoo (rock!), submitted a patch to add a prefix onto install paths (for package builds) and helped fix parallel builds.

Lou Alfonso for suggesting that the safe filter be controlled through a table so that it can be tuned easily.

Christoph Wegscheider noticed that the install script was installing everything 755, for pointing out that not everyone has lex or yacc, and for his input on how umlauts should be converted.

Gerg Thor informed me that characters on the PowerPC platform are unsigned by default and that the libpopt parser was rolling into an infinite loop as a result.

Jon Amundsen pointed out that the lowercase converting sequence was only really working on case-insensitive filesystems.

zero_dogg from sourceforget.net suggested adding the ability to prevent certain files from being translated.

rsnemmen from sourceforge.net pointed out a bug in the way directories are handled when passed in from the command line.

Thanks

Eric S. Raymond for his work on "The Art of UNIX Programming"

http://www.bbsinc.com/iso8859.html for their help in building a complete list of Latin-1 translations.

SourceForge.net for their generous hosting of this and many other projects.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 for its help with explaining UTF-8.

Data Structures Using C - Tenenbaum, Langsam and Augenstein - for their help with hashes.

Paul Oakenfold for his unbelievable mixes. Version 1.0.0 was developed with the help of his Great Wall mix.

Contact

Doug Harple detox.dharple@gmail.com