How do I remove all single quotes in all files recursively using `rename`?

Question

The title says it all and yes I know there are many questions similar, but the closest I could find was removing " and not '. What I've tried so far is:

find -name "*'*" -type f | rename 's/\'//g'

or rename 's/[']//g' and some other variations. I find all the files, but when I'm piping it to rename, I'm just getting >for prompt and have to Ctrl+C to return. I've recently changed a lot of files with this, and it has worked like a charm on any special character, except the single quotes.

Answer 1

You can use double quotes:

rename -n "s/'//g"

remove -n after testing to rename the files for real

Use -exec though...

find -name "*'*" -type f -exec rename -n "s/'//g" '{}' \;

If the list is not too long, make it faster...

find -name "*'*" -type f -exec rename -n "s/'//g" '{}' +

Or, as suggested in comments, use recursive shell globbing:

shopt -s globstar
rename -n "s/'//g" **/*"'"*

You can use shopt -u globstar to turn recursive globbing with ** off, but it will be off anyway when you start a new shell.

Answer 2

This works with bash on my system (OpenSUSE Leap):

$ rename "'" '' **

The 3 args to rename are: "'", '' and ** (globstar), telling it to replace the quote with the empty string and do so recursively.

Note that ** (globstar) is turned on by default on my system. I'm not aware of a way to turn it off.