Now I realize that mine includes a few more characters but basically the moral is that his left nothing but the characters I was seeking to destroy

That would be because tr doesn't take a regex character class, it takes a simple list of characters. :-)

This should do what you want...

tr{A-Za-z0-9_ .=/\\}{}cd;
[download]

For the record, the /c complements the search list, the /d deletes the matching characters.

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If God had meant us to fly, he would *never* have given us the railroads.
    --Michael Flanders