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bash is a great shell. However, while i’m using it i sometimes simple don’t know what to do.
I want to rename some files with spaces in names. For example i have 2 files i need to remove first several chars from their names.

/tmp/tst>ls -l
total 0
-rw-r–r– 1 noone users 0 2006-10-14 10:54 this is file 1.txt
-rw-r–r– 1 noone users 0 2006-10-14 10:54 this is file 2.txt

I’d like to have the following result:

/tmp/tst>ls -l
total 0
-rw-r–r– 1 noone users 0 2006-10-14 10:54 is file 1.txt
-rw-r–r– 1 noone users 0 2006-10-14 10:54 is file 2.txt

Well, the obvious way would be:

for f in `ls`
do
    mv $f `echo $f | cut -b 5-`
done

But it doesn’t work, here’s the problem, file names have spaces:

for f in `ls`; do echo mv $f `echo $f | cut -b 5-`; done
mv this this
mv is
mv file
mv 1.txt t
mv this this
mv is
mv file
mv 2.txt t
mv

After some googling, i got the following way of treating file names with spaces:

find . -type f | while read file; do echo mv \’$file\’ \’`echo $file | cut -b 8-`\’; done;
mv ‘./this is file 1.txt’ ‘is file 1.txt’
mv ‘./this is file 2.txt’ ‘is file 2.txt’

Well, it looks to be working, let’s remove the echo and see what happens:

find . -type f | while read file; do mv \’$file\’ \’`echo $file | cut -b 8-`\’; done;
mv: target `1.txt\'’ is not a directory
mv: target `2.txt\'’ is not a directory

Here i was broken and i just did copy-paste of the ‘echo’ results before into the shell.
What should i do to make it work? Bash experts, HELP!
Update:
The correct code would be:
find . -type f | while read file; do mv “$file“ “`echo $file | cut -b 8-`“; done;thanks to archlinux forums

Update 2:
Here’s python code to replace spaces with ‘_’ in file names:
#! /usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-
# rename_file_with_spaces.py

import sys
import os

if len(sys.argv) != 2:
print ‘Usage ‘, sys.argv[0], ‘ directory’
sys.exit(1)

for fileName in os.listdir(sys.argv[1]):
if ‘ ‘ not in fileName:
continue
newFileName = fileName.replace(’ ‘, ‘_’)
os.rename(fileName, newFileName)

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