Batch removal of special characters from file names in Linux

I am seeking to remove all special characters from several files' worth of downloaded .pdfs, and came across exactly the solution I was looking for, albeit in an OS X environment:

function to automatically remove special characters from file names during saving in MacOS X.

Could a similar method--either using sed or some other function--be implemented in a Linux environment?

Answer

You can do this with the rename command. If you are in the folder with the .pdf files with special characters:

rename 's/[^a-zA-Z0-9]//g' *.pdf

This will remove any characters from files ending in .pdf that are not A-Z in either case, or numbers. You can add to this list:

rename 's/[^a-zA-Z0-9_]//g' *.pdf

This version allows underscores.