[SOLVED] Replace whitespaces with dots "." on all files in folder

Hypertenzion · 11-09-2010, 06:28 AM

I have a lot of .avi,.mkv,.srt files with empty spaces that needs to be filled out with a dot "."

Example:

With space = "my movie file here.avi"
Replaced with dots = "my.movie.file.here.avi"

I need help with a script that does that

Help much appreciated!

H_TeXMeX_H · 11-09-2010, 06:39 AM

Code:

for i in *; do mv "$i" $(echo "$i" | tr " " "."); done

Also, I modified this from a script I wrote to fix file names:

Code:

for i in *
do
  mv "$i" $(echo "$i" | tr [:upper:] [:lower:] | tr [:blank:] _ | sed 's|[^-._a-z0-9]||g')
done

this one makes names lower case, replaces all white space with _, and removes all non-printable or strange characters.

colucix · 11-09-2010, 06:41 AM

What have you tried so far? The rename command should do the trick. Anyway, there are two versions of the command out there. On my current system (CentOS) it acts only on the first occurrence of the pattern.

In alternative you can try shell's parameter substitution, replacing every occurrence of a space with a dot, e.g.

Code:

for file in *" "*
do
  echo mv $file ${file// /.}
done

where the echo statement is only for testing purposes. This does not replace a sequence of two or more spaces (if any) with a single dot, anyway.

H_TeXMeX_H · 11-09-2010, 06:42 AM

Actually, I tried rename, but surprisingly it only replaces the first space with a dot.

jf.argentino · 11-09-2010, 06:42 AM

Something like:

Code:

find YOUR_DIR | while read FILE; do
   OFILE=`echo $FILE |*sed "s/ /./g"`
   mv $FILE $OFILE
done

will do the job

Hypertenzion · 11-09-2010, 06:45 AM

Thx for the quick replies, people!

I fixed it with the following:

Code:

find -type f -exec rename 'y/\ /\./' {}  \;

colucix · 11-09-2010, 07:09 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by H_TeXMeX_H

Actually, I tried rename, but surprisingly it only replaces the first space with a dot.

I was surprised too, but accordingly to the man page it is the expected behaviour:

Code:

SYNOPSIS
       rename from to file...

DESCRIPTION
       rename will rename the specified files by replacing
       the first occurrence of from in their name by to.

However this applies only on rename as an ELF executable provided by the util-linux package. Instead, on Debian-based systems the rename command is a perl script that accepts a perl expression in place of the two patterns, so that we can use something like:

Code:

rename 's/ +/./g' *" "*

where the g modifier does the trick. Looking at the last post from the OP, it seems the perl version is in action here.

Hypertenzion · 11-11-2010, 12:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by colucix

I was surprised too, but accordingly to the man page it is the expected behaviour:

Code:

SYNOPSIS
       rename from to file...

DESCRIPTION
       rename will rename the specified files by replacing
       the first occurrence of from in their name by to.

However this applies only on rename as an ELF executable provided by the util-linux package. Instead, on Debian-based systems the rename command is a perl script that accepts a perl expression in place of the two patterns, so that we can use something like:

Code:

rename 's/ +/./g' *" "*

where the g modifier does the trick. Looking at the last post from the OP, it seems the perl version is in action here.

Thx!

The code:

Code:

rename 's/ +/./g' *" "*

Works on both files and folders!

The code:

Code:

find -type f -exec rename 'y/\ /\./' {}  \;

Only works on files.