[SOLVED] What have I done?

Needsashave · 04-15-2013, 10:48 PM

Hi guys,
I was trying to rename files en-masse and prefix them all with a double s. Obviously I wasn't supposed to do it this way;

root@hairybusiness:~/Desktop/staticbins# for file in ./*; do mv $file ss&$file ; done
[1] 13509
[2] 13511

What actually happened here, and if i should reverse it, how?

konsolebox · 04-15-2013, 11:38 PM

I think one of the last files moved has become ss. Not sure how you could fix that with the other files. You could use a data recovery tool for your filesystem but I'm not sure how successfully it would be.

Since commands were executed asynchronously you can't really tell which file was last moved to become ss, but you could have a bet with the last call. You must have seen messages like "command not found.". The one on the last is probably the last file.

Needsashave · 04-15-2013, 11:48 PM

Ah,
Now that you mention it, ss is there, but all the other files remain at their original name. Thanks, shouldn't be too hard to find the missing one...
Not sure what the numbers in square brackets are though. Inodes?

PTrenholme · 04-16-2013, 12:23 AM

A few questions:

You're running test scripts as root?
Your script assumes that your file names will never be split by bash. Is that reasonable?
KDE includes a krename program for bulk file renaming. Does your distribution have a similar program?
Don't you need additional options in your ls command to exclude sub-directories and their children?
Have you considered using the find command's -exec action?
What is the point of the "&" in your mv command? The form ss${file} might be a better choice.

konsolebox · 04-16-2013, 01:14 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Needsashave

Ah,
Now that you mention it, ss is there, but all the other files remain at their original name. Thanks, shouldn't be too hard to find the missing one...

Odd that they're still there after you ran mv on them. Perhaps mv didn't decide to overwrite the new file? If it did then perhaps it's the first called file that was renamed.

Quote:

Not sure what the numbers in square brackets are though. Inodes?

They're job numbers. See JOB CONTROL in bash's manual.

Needsashave · 04-16-2013, 02:44 AM

Ahhhh job numbers. All making more sense now.

1. Running as root because I long since got sick of sudo & not a critical system.
2. Not sure what splitting files names by bash is. Gonna read up on that.
3. Gnome.
4. There are no children directories.
5. Cool. Didn't know find could do this. Looks like the find -execdir option is good.
6. Didn't work with that syntax either. Getting file not found messages because $file includes the ./ path. Fixed it with;

Code:

for file in ./*; do mv $file ss$(basename $file); done

Thanks for your help guys. Steep learning curve.

chrism01 · 04-16-2013, 08:19 AM

You got the job numbers because '&' backgrounds the preceding cmd.
Never use it as part of a name or cmd , unless that's the functionality you want.

The nice thing about the 'find' cmd for this would have been that it has a '-type f' option, to only process regular files eg not dirs as well.

Useful links
http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz
http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-G...tml/index.html
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/