slugger

A unix filesystem utility to rename files using a restricted url-safe character subset.

Why slug your file paths?

Avoid bugs and vulnerabilities due to poor handling of problematic characters including spaces, quotes, etc
Simplify things by sticking with lowercase
Allow paths to be typed without keyboard gymnastics
Allow easy tab completion

Usage

Slugger reads filesystem paths from standard input, one per line. In the default mode, it just prints out the slugged versions. If you pass the --rename command line argument, slugger will do the file renames. Typically the input comes from commands that output lists of files like find, ls, etc.

Preview slugged names without doing anything: find . -type f | slugger
Do the actual renaming: find . -type f | slugger --rename

How files are renamed

Convert to lowercase
Trim leading and trailing whitespace
Remove repeated dashes
Do a "unidecode" to translate mostly to ASCII
Convert all whitespaces to dash
Delete anything else

Behavior notes

slugger will not clobber existing files. If the slugged file already exists, it will abort and exit with an error code.
slugger is safe to run on already-slugged files. It will no-op and exit success (it's idempotent).

How correct and stable is it?