detox – clean up filenames

Last Updated on December 1, 2025

The detox utility renames files to make them easier to work with under Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.

The tool replaces characters that make it hard to type out a filename with dashes and underscores. It also provides transcoding-based filters, converting ISO-8859-1 or CP-1252 to UTF-8. An additional filter unescapes CGI-escaped filenames.

It’s easy to create a filename with spaces, parenthesis, brackets, and ampersands under some operating systems. These have special meaning within FreeBSD and Linux,
and cause problems when you go to access them. detox is provided to resolve these problems.

Features include:

• Use a config file instead of the default configuration files for loading translation sequences.
• Run in inline mode. The inline-detox utility generates new filenames to make them easier to work with under Linux.
• List the currently available sequences. When paired with -v this option shows what filters are used in each sequence and any properties applied to the filters
• Dry run – doesn’t actually change anything.
• Recurse into subdirectories. Any file or directory that starts with a period, such as .git/ or .cache/, will be ignored during recursion unless specified on the command line. Also, any file or directory specified in the ignore section of the config file will be ignored during recursion.
• Work on special files (including links). Normally detox ignores these files. detox will not recurse into symlinks that point at directories.

Website: github.com/dharple/detox
Support:
Developer: Doug Harple
License: BSD 3-Clause “New” or “Revised” License

detox is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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