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Accepted
Rich
Asked: 2011-04-28 17:11:54 +0800 CST

How to bulk rename files to remove an extraneous space from before the extension

  • 772

I have a bunch of files who's filename follows the pattern 'filename.ext'. eg:

filename .ext

I would like to rename all of these to remove the space before the .ext. eg:

filename.ext

I can find them all using

find * -type f -name'* .*'

but how can I then rename all these files?

linux bash shell find rename

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Make a file named "renamethis.sh". Its contents should be:

    #!/bin/bash
mv "$1" "$(echo $1 | sed 's/ \././')"

    Set the executable bit: chmod a+x renamethis.sh. Then, run something like:

    find /path/to/dir -name '* .*' -type f -print0 | xargs -0L 1 /path/to/renamethis.sh

    YMMV, no warranty express or implied, etc.

    FWIW, the spaces are what makes this strange; as long as you don't have other oddball characters in the files names, you're good to go with this approach. If you do, you may want to consider something like a scandir/readdir loop in Perl or PHP, but the above script is the first thing that came to mind.

    • 4

  2. This should do it for you.

    #!/bin/bash

OLDIFS=${IFS}
IFS=$'\n'

for file in `find * -type f -name '* .*'`; do
 _ext=`echo ${file} | cut -d '.' -f 2-`
 _filename=`echo ${file} | cut -d ' ' -f 1`
 mv "${file}" ${_filename}.${_ext}
done

IFS=${OLDIFS}
    • 1

  3. I see that you've already solved your immediate problem, but in the future you might want to consider using mmv.

    • 1

  4. In one line:

    find -depth -name '* .*' -print0 |
perl -wn0e '$orig = $_; s/\s+\././g; rename($orig, $_) or warn "$orig: $!\n"'

    Highlights:

    • no problem with quoting spaces in filenames
    • no problem with filenames starting with a dash
    • fast: only two processes started in parallel
    • handles directories correctly
    • 1