Renaming files in subdirectories

J2O1988 · 02-10-2010, 09:24 AM

Hi,

I'm currently trying to make a script to rename all the files with one provided file extension to a second provided file extension. I've achieved this by commanding "sh newext doc txt" with the following which works perfectly:

#!/bin/sh

for f in *$1;
do
mv "$f" "`basename "$f" $1`$2";
done;

However, I'd like to be able to modify what I've written so far, so that I can choose whether to convert file extensions in a subdirectory or not. For example, I could enter "sh newext -r doc txt" and the subdirectory's files would also be affected by my script, or enter "sh newext -n doc txt" which would only affect the directory I'm in.

I searched the forums and found a few things that I'm now looking in to, but anything else would be much appreciated. Thanks.

jschiwal · 02-10-2010, 09:52 AM

You could use "rename doc txt *.doc" to change all of the extensions in a directory.

For subdirectories, you could use the find command to return a list of subdirectories in a outer loop.

You can use find to locate files and execute the rename command:

This will do it for a single directory.
find <dir> -maxdepth 1 -type f -execdir rename doc txt '{}' \;

This will do it for subdirectories as well:
find <dir> -type f -execdir rename doc txt '{}' \;

Note: Some distro's have a perl like syntax for rename instead of the rename supplied by the linux-utils package.

chrism01 · 02-10-2010, 05:39 PM

I think you mean maxdepth instead of maxdir there http://linux.die.net/man/1/find

jschiwal · 02-10-2010, 05:43 PM

chrism01: Yes, thanks. I corrected it in my post. I use that option daily, so I don't know why I typed dir instead of depth.

sumeet inani · 02-13-2010, 01:39 AM

J2O1988 has an interesting idea
i would like to illustrate for benefit of all
(1)It is said that debian distros have rename command available by default.I use ubuntu 8.04.For others get http://tips.webdesign10.com/files/rename.pl.txt & make it executable then move to /usr/bin folder.
(2)I thought about converting all file names to lower case as this makes filename auto-completion easier.(I don't remember the case of starting letter of file.Though alternative for bash is
add to ~/.inputrc "set completion-ignore-case On" without quotes)
I ran

Code:

find /data/sumeet/txt -type f -iname '*.*' -execdir rename -v  's/(.+)\.(.+)/\L$1\.$2\E/' '{}' ';'

Little Explanation

Code:

-execdir run command from subdirectory containing matched file
-v verbose output of rename (You can use -n to do test run without affecting change when in doubt)
\L lowercase till \E
\. represents period as simply . represents "any character" in perl expression(evident from .+ usage in parentheses)
s means substitute
$1 and $2 represents content of first & second parentheses respectively.
+ means repetition allowed 1 or more times

You can read more at
(1)http://www.anaesthetist.com/mnm/perl....htm#regex.htm
(2)http://www.troubleshooters.com/codec...rl/perlreg.htm
(3)http://tips.webdesign10.com/how-to-b...n-the-terminal
If this helps you than thank me by pressing thumbs up button.Thank You.