Linux/Mac/Windows file name friction

I've encountered a number of linux programs that put colons in a lot of their filenames. rdiff-backup and isync/mbsync immediately come to mind.

I was all set to give you a lecture on eating plenty of fiber, grains and leafy vegetables, after seeing the threat title.

Never mind.

A pox on any program that makes weird filenames, especially those idiotic things that use spaces!

Not that I would ever download any restrictive-copyrighted materials, Mininova.com puts random things into their torrent filenames, like "-{mininova}-" and sometimes those mixed bracket-dash-ampersand-dingbat combinations play heck with trying to refer to the file on the command line.

Konqueror will select (and rename) the files without trouble, so it's not a killer, but I would love a quick script that would go through a directory and strip out all the non "A-Z,a-z,0-9,-_" characters, replace the spaces with underscores, and hopefully do a "-1, -2,..." to any resulting duplications.

Maybe this is a good candidate for the "bounty" system of software development?