Batch rename troubles

djeikyb · 07-03-2007, 08:03 PM

Code:

for i in *; do mv "$i" 'echo $i | tr ' ' '_''; done

This should convert spaces to underscores for all files in the directory, right?

When run, I get an error: mv: target ' _' is not a directory.

I'm using cygwin in XP home.

gilead · 07-03-2007, 08:11 PM

You need to use back ticks, not single quotes. Try the following:

Code:

for i in *; do mv "$i" `echo $i | tr ' ' '_'`; done

djeikyb · 07-03-2007, 10:06 PM

Oh! Works great now, thanks! Never knew that key was useful.

dawkcid · 07-04-2007, 12:43 PM

The shell can do this itself,

Code:

for i in *\ *; do mv "$i" "${i// /_}"; done

Note that I've changed the * to *\ *, this will skip any files that don't have a space in them (it doesn't do any harm to glob everthing, but it stops mv complaining about the filenames being the same if there are no spaces).

Of course, if you have subdirectories, you probably should use find...

djeikyb · 07-04-2007, 03:38 PM

What I'm really trying to do is strip a bunch of windows shortcuts of the prefix "Shortcut to ". I'm having trouble I think because of the whitespace, so I converted it to underscores, which really isn't desirable. I'm quite new to anything cl beyond basic navigation, but I'm hopefully learning as I piece together googled scraps of code.

Code:

for FILE in *lnk; do NEWFILE=`echo $FILE | sed 's/Shortcut to //g'`; echo "$FILE becomes $NEWFILE"; done
for FILE in *.lnk; do NEWFILE=`echo $FILE | sed 's/Shortcut to //g'`; mv $FILE $NEWFILE; done

The first displays as expected, but the second errors: mv: target `[X].lnk' is not a directory

To incorporate find for subdirectories, should it be "for i in find .lnk ./;"?