find /path/to/files -type f -not -name "M*'.jpg" -exec mv "{}" "{}".mxg \;
I fear I made two mistakes.
Files are stored in a directory structure. Goal is to keep the filenames and change the file extension from .jpg to .mxg. But only for files that have 'M' as the first character of there filename.
The above line has this result:
all files have .mxg added. So the .jpg isn't and all files are changed.
This should do it:
find /path/to/files -type f -name 'M*.jpg' -exec bash -c 'echo mv "$1" "${1/jpg/mxg}"' -- {} \;
A somewhat cleaner solution is if you have the rename command. However, there are different implementations out there, so read your man page first to check you have the same as mine. The version I have in Debian is Larry Wall's implementation in perl. You can recognize this by the example rename 's/\.bak$//' *.bak near the top, or the AUTHOR section near the bottom. With this implementation you can rename your files like this:
find /path/to/files -type f -name 'M*.jpg' -exec rename 's/jpg$/mxg/' {} \;
Related
I want to rename folder/directory names recursively and found this solution on SO. However this command has no effect
find . -type f -exec rename 's/old/new/' '{}' \;
Is that a correct command?
find . -depth -name '*a_*' -execdir bash -c 'mv "$0" "${0//a_/b_}"' {} \;
The -depth switch is important so that the directory content is processed before the directory itself! otherwise you'll run into problems :).
100% safe regarding filenames with spaces or other funny symbols.
I have many files without file extention. Now I want to add .txt to all files. I tried the following but it gives an error, mv: rename . to ..txt: Invalid argument.
How can I achieve this?
find . -iname "*.*" -exec bash -c 'mv "$0" "$0.txt"' {} \;
You're nearly there!
Just add -type f to only deal with files:
find . -type f -exec bash -c 'mv "$0" "$0.txt"' {} \;
If your mv handles the -n option, you might want to use it (that's the option to not overwrite existing files).
The error your having is because . is one of the first found by found, and your system complains (rightly) when you want to rename .! with the -type f you're sure this won't happen. Now if you wanted to act on everything inside your directory, you would, e.g., add -mindepth 1 at the beginning of the find command (as . is considered depth 0).
It is not very clear in your question, but what if you want to add the extension .txt to all files that don't have an extension? (we'll agree that to have an extension means to have a period in the name). In this case, you'll use the negation of -name '*.*' as follows:
find . -type f \! -name '*.*' -exec bash -c 'mv "$0" "$0.txt"' {} \;
I'm trying to create a batch file in linux that will allow me to change extensions of files in multiple subdirectories. After much searching and experimenting i've found what seems to be a solution:
find /volume1/uploads -name "*.mkv" -exec rename .mkv .avi {} +
When running the script i get the following error:
find: -exec CMD must end by ';'
I've tried adding ; and \; (with or without +) but to no avail. What's wrong with the command and how can I fix it?
Edit: Running on a Synology NAS with DSM 4.2
you have to escape all characters that would be interpreted by bash. in your case these are the semicolon and the curly braces (you forgot to escape the latter in your code):
find /volume1/uploads -name "*.mkv" -exec rename .mkv .avi \{\} \;
the {} (in our case \{\}) is expanded to the filename, so the actual call would look like rename .mkv .avi /volume1/uploads/foo/bla.mkv (which is not the exact syntax the /usr/bin/rename needs, at least on my system).
instead it would be something like:
find /volume1/uploads -name "*.mkv" -exec rename 's/\.mkv$/.avi/' \{\} \;
UPDATE
if you don't want to (or cannot) use perl's rename script, you could use the following simple bash script and save it as /tmp/rename.sh
#!/bin/sh
INFILE=$1
OUTFILE="${INFILE%.mkv}.avi"
echo "moving ${INFILE} to ${OUTFILE}"
mv "${INFILE}" "${OUTFILE}"
make it executable (chmod u+x /tmp/rename.sh) and call:
find /volume1/uploads -name "*.mkv" -exec /tmp/rename.sh \{\} \;
UPDATE2
it turned out that this question is really not about bash but about busybox.
with a limited shell interpreter like busybox, the simplest solution is just to append the new file extension:
find /volume1/uploads -name "*.mkv" -exec mv \{\} \{\}.avi \;
Not sure how different find and rename commands are on your DSM 4.2 OS so try something like:
find /volume1/uploads -name "*.mkv" | while read filename;
do mv -v "${filename}" "$(echo "${filename}" | sed -e 's/\.mkv$/\.avi/')"
done
So basically, I have a folder with a bunch of subfolders all with over 100 files in them. I want to take all of the mp3 files (really generic extension since I'll have to do this with jpg, etc.) and move them to a new folder in the original directory. So basically the file structure looks like this:
/.../dir/recup1/file1.mp3
/.../dir/recup2/file2.mp3
... etc.
and I want it to look like this:
/.../dir/music/file1.mp3
/.../dir/music/file2.mp3
... etc.
I figured I would use a bash script that looked along these lines:
#!/bin/bash
STR=`find ./ -type f -name \*.mp3`
FILES=(echo $STR | tr ".mp3 " "\n")
for x in $FILES
do
echo "> [$x]"
done
I just have it echo for now, but eventually I would want to use mv to get it to the correct folder. Obviously this doesn't work though because tr sees each character as a delimiter, so if you guys have a better idea I'd appreciate it.
(FYI, I'm running netbook Ubuntu, so if there's a GUI way akin to Windows' search, I would not be against using it)
If the music folder exists then the following should work -
find /path/to/search -type f -iname "*.mp3" -exec mv {} path/to/music \;
A -exec command must be terminated with a ; (so you usually need to type \; or ';' to avoid interpretion by the shell) or a +. The difference is that with ;, the command is called once per file, with +, it is called just as few times as possible (usually once, but there is a maximum length for a command line, so it might be split up) with all filenames.
You can do it like this:
find /some/dir -type f -iname '*.mp3' -exec mv \{\} /where/to/move/ \;
The \{\} part will be replaced by the found file name/path. The \; part sets the end for the -exec part, it can't be left out.
If you want to print what was found, just add a -print flag like:
find /some/dir -type f -iname '*.mp3' -print -exec mv \{\} /where/to/move/ \;
HTH
I'm trying to do something which is probably very simple, I have a directory structure such as:
dir/
subdir1/
subdir2/
file1
file2
subsubdir1/
file3
I would like to run a command in a bash script that will delete all files recursively from dir on down, but leave all directories. Ie:
dir/
subdir1/
subdir2/
subsubdir1
What would be a suitable command for this?
find dir -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm
find lists all files that match certain expression in a given directory, recursively. -type f matches regular files. -print0 is for printing out names using \0 as delimiter (as any other character, including \n, might be in a path name). xargs is for gathering the file names from standard input and putting them as a parameters. -0 is to make sure xargs will understand the \0 delimiter.
xargs is wise enough to call rm multiple times if the parameter list would get too big. So it is much better than trying to call sth. like rm $((find ...). Also it much faster than calling rm for each file by itself, like find ... -exec rm \{\}.
With GNU's find you can use the -delete action:
find dir -type f -delete
With standard find you can use -exec rm:
find dir -type f -exec rm {} +
find dir -type f -exec rm '{}' +
find dir -type f -exec rm {} \;
where dir is the top level of where you want to delete files from
Note that this will only delete regular files, not symlinks, not devices, etc. If you want to delete everything except directories, use
find dir -not -type d -exec rm {} \;