find-characters

How to find files with "forbidden" characters in their names on a Linux system. Forbidden characters could be non-printable or non-ASCII characters.

Part A

Copy and paste these commands in the Linux Terminal.

Part 1

LC_COLLATE=C find . -name '*[! -~]*'

The "forbidden" characters are returned as they are.

Part 2

LC_ALL=C find . -name '*[! -~]*'

The "forbidden" characters are returned as questions marks, e.g., "??".

LC_ALL=C find . -name '*[![:print:]]*'

This might not work as well as the two other ones.

Sources:

• https://www.baeldung.com/linux/find-special-character-filenames

Part B

Another good idea could be to list all filenames with a command like tree, then save this output to a file, then analyze this file with another command. When it is done like this, the file system does not have to be scanned so frequently because scanning the whole filesystem takes a lot of time.