How to remove spaces from many file names under Cygwin

gwc01 · 11-22-2010, 04:00 AM

Hi,

Im hoping that someone can help me, I need to remove spaces (not replace with underscores) from several thousand files on a system with cygwin.
Can I do this from the shell using rename or mv somehow?

Thanks

T0sh1r0 · 11-22-2010, 04:27 AM

Hello

Why don't you try to use "tr"?
I am not under unix today so I cannot test, but something like

Code:

ls -1 | tr -d ' '

to delete the space or

Code:

ls -1 | tr ' ' '_'

to change them into underscore.
The man page should give you more options and ideas.

Hope this helps ;-)

gwc01 · 11-22-2010, 04:46 AM

Hi,

ls -1 | tr -d ' '

Seems to give the directory listing with out spaces in file names, but it hasnt removed (renamed the files) the spaces from the file names.

However I found that this works exactly how I need it to:

find $DIR -type f -name '* *' | while read f; do d="${f%/*}"; f="${f##*/}"; mv "$d/$f" "$d/${f// }"; done

grail · 11-22-2010, 05:00 AM

If you have access to the perl copy of rename (as on Ubuntu) you could try:

Code:

find $DIR -type f -name '* *' -exec rename 's/ //g' {} \;

adityavpratap · 11-22-2010, 06:01 AM

I think this command will server your purpose

$ for i in *; do rename 's/ //g' "$i"; done

Obviously, it has to be executed in the directory where the required files are existing.