Recursively rename files - oneliner preferably
find . -name '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 -n1 bash -c 'mv "$0" "${0/oldname/newname}"'
Obviously, that rename pattern is just a simple example, but beware that as is it will edit the whole path, not just the filename.
the mmv command will do this in a rather simple call:
mmv ";name_1.txt" "#1name_2.txt"
The ";" wildcard, which is reused in the replacement filename as "#1" matches also subdirectories.
If you need more complicated examples, you should look into the man-page.
As @ams points out, many recursive replace solutions require you to work with the whole path, not just the file name.
I use find
's -execdir
action to solve this problem. If you use -execdir
instead of -exec
, the specified command is run from the subdirectory containing the matched file. So, instead of passing the whole path to rename
, it only passes ./filename
. That makes it much easier to write the replace command.
find /the/path -type f \
-name '*_one.txt' \
-execdir rename 's/\.\/(.+)_one\.txt$/$1_two.txt/' {} \;
In detail:
-type f
means only look for files, not directories-name '*_one.txt'
means means only match filenames that end in _one.txt- In this answer, I'm using the
rename
command instead of mv. rename uses a Perl regular expression to rename each file. - The backslashes after
-type
and-name
are the bash line-continuation character. I use them to make this example more readable, but they are not needed in practice. - However, the backslash at the end of the
-execdir
line is required. It is there to esacpe the semicolon, which terminates the command run by-execdir
. Fun!
Explanation of the regex:
s/
start of the regex\.\/
match the leading ./ that -execdir passes in. Use \ to escape the . and / metacharacters(.+)
match the start of the filename. The parentheses capture the match for later use_one\.txt
match "_one.txt", escape the dot metacharacter$
anchor the match at the end of the string/
marks the end of the "match" part of the regex, and the start of the "replace" part$1
references the existing filename, because we captured it with parentheses. If you use multiple sets of parentheses in the "match" part, you can refer to them here using $2, $3, etc._two.txt
the new file name will end in "_two.txt". No need to escape the dot metacharacter here in the "replace" section/
end of the regex
Before
tree --charset=ascii
|-- a_one.txt
|-- b_one.txt
|-- Not_this.txt
`-- dir1
`-- c_one.txt
After
tree --charset=ascii
|-- a_two.txt
|-- b_two.txt
|-- Not_this.txt
`-- dir1
`-- c_two.txt
Hint: rename
's -n option is useful. It does a dry run and shows you what names it will change, but does not make any changes.