regex w/ sed and bash expression

[parv]

this was, on the fateful occasion around Sep 27 00:21 -0400,
sent by David S. Jackson                                             
>
> Hi,
> 
> I'm trying to make a variable expand to include a list of
> filenames with braces and parens as part of the filename.  (The
> files are mp3s with brackets and parens, etc, in the filenames
> themselves.)  I just want the resulting expansion to insert an
> escape character infront of spaces and special characters so the
> shell can find them.
> 
> Example:  don mclean - american pie (uncut version).mp3
> and [John Wayne]-[Pledge_of_Allegiance].mp3
...

would you care for a perl program which changes file names
to character set of [a-zA-z_-.], optionally use only lower
case ascii characters?

or at least, it could you give some idea ... albeit in perl.

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