bash annoyance
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 -lWell, the obvious way would be:
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
for f in `ls`But it doesn’t work, here’s the problem, file names have spaces:
do
mv $f `echo $f | cut -b 5-`
done
for f in `ls`; do echo mv $f `echo $f | cut -b 5-`; doneAfter some googling, i got the following way of treating file names with spaces:
mv this this
mv is
mv file
mv 1.txt t
mv this this
mv is
mv file
mv 2.txt t
mv
find . -type f | while read file; do echo mv \’$file\’ \’`echo $file | cut -b 8-`\’; done;Well, it looks to be working, let’s remove the echo and see what happens:
mv ‘./this is file 1.txt’ ‘is file 1.txt’
mv ‘./this is file 2.txt’ ‘is file 2.txt’
find . -type f | while read file; do mv \’$file\’ \’`echo $file | cut -b 8-`\’; done;Here i was broken and i just did copy-paste of the ‘echo’ results before into the shell.
mv: target `1.txt\'’ is not a directory
mv: target `2.txt\'’ is not a directory
What should i do to make it work? Bash experts, HELP!
Update:
The correct code would be:
find . -type f | while read file; do mv “$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)
Uhmm, how about ‘rename’?
to convert spaces to underscores for instance:
rename y/ /_/ *
to convert to lowercase:
rename y/A-Z/a-z/ *
(Of course care should be taken with the *, that renames everything in the current directory…)
Comment by eric casteleijn — December 21, 2006 @ 16:44
As far as i know rename does not accept regexps. I tried what you suggested, but it did nothing. Did you check the command?
Comment by linux4all — December 21, 2006 @ 20:03