perl renaming files

Xris718 · 04-24-2006, 03:17 PM

Hi

Does anyone know how you can change file extensions using perl on the fly. (Ex: change a.txt to a.TXT)

NOTE: I prefer not to use sed or awk if possible.

Thanks in advance

puffinman · 04-24-2006, 04:43 PM

This is a script I wrote and use all the time. It allows you to use a regex to rename files. For example, if you wanted to anything with extension .TXT to .txt, you would do

Code:

pmv 's/TXT$/txt$/' *.TXT

And here's the script, I call it pmv (perl mv). It's pretty much right out of Programming Perl with a little embellishment.

Code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

my ($verbose, $test);
my $separator = " => ";

GetOptions (
	    "test|dryrun" => \$test,
	    "separator=s" => \$separator,
	    "verbose" => \$verbose,
	   ) or die "$0: options error\n";


$verbose = 1 if $test;

my $op = shift or die "Usage: $0 REGEX file1 [ file2 ... ]\n";

for (@ARGV) {
    my $was = $_;
    eval $op;
    die "Invalid regex" if $@;
    unless ($was eq $_) {
      if (not $test) {
	rename $was, $_ or warn "Rename of $was failed";
      }
      print "$was$separator$_\n" if $verbose;
    }
}

bigearsbilly · 04-25-2006, 09:27 AM

or I usually do stuff this way,

Code:

ls *.txt | while read f;do echo mv $f ${f%.txt}.TXT;done  > 1

(have a look at '1' see if's groovy, you also get a record of what you did)

sh 1