this question is somewhat unique among others asked.
i have a dir with a bunch of folders and they are named using periods to separate every word.
such as: foo.bar.2011.useless.words
the last two words are always the useless ones, so i would like to truncate starting with the second to last period.
not sure of the wording...
many thanks
for file in *.*.*
do
mv "$file" "${file%.*.*}"
done
If your folders with dots are only one level deep, go with Ignacio's answer. However, if you have folders that you want to rename that exist in subdirs such as /toplevel/subdir1/foo.bar.baz.blah/ then you'll need to use my find command below. Unless you have Bash 4.x in which case you can use the shopt -s globstar option.
find /top/level/dir -type d -name '*.*.*' -exec sh -c 'for arg; do echo mv "$arg" "${arg%.*.*}"; done' _ {} +
I added an echo in there so you can do a dry-run without making any changes. Remove the echo if you are satisfied with the output and run it again to make the changes permanent.
Edit
Removed my $tmp var by shamelessly stealing Ignacio's PE
Related
From the current directory I have multiple sub directories:
subdir1/
001myfile001A.txt
002myfile002A.txt
subdir2/
001myfile001B.txt
002myfile002B.txt
where I want to strip every character from the filenames before myfile so I end up with
subdir1/
myfile001A.txt
myfile002A.txt
subdir2/
myfile001B.txt
myfile002B.txt
I have some code to do this...
#!/bin/bash
for d in `find . -type d -maxdepth 1`; do
cd "$d"
for f in `find . "*.txt"`; do
mv "$f" "$(echo "$f" | sed -r 's/^.*myfile/myfile/')"
done
done
however the newly renamed files end up in the parent directory
i.e.
myfile001A.txt
myfile002A.txt
myfile001B.txt
myfile002B.txt
subdir1/
subdir2/
In which the sub-directories are now empty.
How do I alter my script to rename the files and keep them in their respective sub-directories? As you can see the first loop changes directory to the sub directory so not sure why the files end up getting sent up a directory...
Your script has multiple problems. In the first place, your outer find command doesn't do quite what you expect: it outputs not only each of the subdirectories, but also the search root, ., which is itself a directory. You could have discovered this by running the command manually, among other ways. You don't really need to use find for this, but supposing that you do use it, this would be better:
for d in $(find * -maxdepth 0 -type d); do
Moreover, . is the first result of your original find command, and your problems continue there. Your initial cd is without meaningful effect, because you're just changing to the same directory you're already in. The find command in the inner loop is rooted there, and descends into both subdirectories. The path information for each file you choose to rename is therefore stripped by sed, which is why the results end up in the initial working directory (./subdir1/001myfile001A.txt --> myfile001A.txt). By the time you process the subdirectories, there are no files left in them to rename.
But that's not all: the find command in your inner loop is incorrect. Because you do not specify an option before it, find interprets "*.txt" as designating a second search root, in addition to .. You presumably wanted to use -name "*.txt" to filter the find results; without it, find outputs the name of every file in the tree. Presumably you're suppressing or ignoring the error messages that result.
But supposing that your subdirectories have no subdirectories of their own, as shown, and that you aren't concerned with dotfiles, even this corrected version ...
for f in `find . -name "*.txt"`;
... is an awfully heavyweight way of saying this ...
for f in *.txt;
... or even this ...
for f in *?myfile*.txt;
... the latter of which will avoid attempts to rename any files whose names do not, in fact, change.
Furthermore, launching a sed process for each file name is pretty wasteful and expensive when you could just use bash's built-in substitution feature:
mv "$f" "${f/#*myfile/myfile}"
And you will find also that your working directory gets messed up. The working directory is a characteristic of the overall shell environment, so it does not automatically reset on each loop iteration. You'll need to handle that manually in some way. pushd / popd would do that, as would running the outer loop's body in a subshell.
Overall, this will do the trick:
#!/bin/bash
for d in $(find * -maxdepth 0 -type d); do
pushd "$d"
for f in *.txt; do
mv "$f" "${f/#*myfile/myfile}"
done
popd
done
You can do it without find and sed:
$ for f in */*.txt; do echo mv "$f" "${f/\/*myfile/\/myfile}"; done
mv subdir1/001myfile001A.txt subdir1/myfile001A.txt
mv subdir1/002myfile002A.txt subdir1/myfile002A.txt
mv subdir2/001myfile001B.txt subdir2/myfile001B.txt
mv subdir2/002myfile002B.txt subdir2/myfile002B.txt
If you remove the echo, it'll actually rename the files.
This uses shell parameter expansion to replace a slash and anything up to myfile with just a slash and myfile.
Notice that this breaks if there is more than one level of subdirectories. In that case, you could use extended pattern matching (enabled with shopt -s extglob) and the globstar shell option (shopt -s globstar):
$ for f in **/*.txt; do echo mv "$f" "${f/\/*([!\/])myfile/\/myfile}"; done
mv subdir1/001myfile001A.txt subdir1/myfile001A.txt
mv subdir1/002myfile002A.txt subdir1/myfile002A.txt
mv subdir1/subdir3/001myfile001A.txt subdir1/subdir3/myfile001A.txt
mv subdir1/subdir3/002myfile002A.txt subdir1/subdir3/myfile002A.txt
mv subdir2/001myfile001B.txt subdir2/myfile001B.txt
mv subdir2/002myfile002B.txt subdir2/myfile002B.txt
This uses the *([!\/]) pattern ("zero or more characters that are not a forward slash"). The slash has to be escaped in the bracket expression because we're still inside of the pattern part of the ${parameter/pattern/string} expansion.
Maybe you want to use the following command instead:
rename 's#(.*/).*(myfile.*)#$1$2#' subdir*/*
You can use rename -n ... to check the outcome without actually renaming anything.
Regarding your actual question:
The find command from the outer loop returns 3 (!) directories:
.
./subdir1
./subdir2
The unwanted . is the reason why all files end up in the parent directory (that is .). You can exclude . by using the option -mindepth 1.
Unfortunately, this was onyl the reason for the files landing in the wrong place, but not the only problem. Since you already accepted one of the answers, there is no need to list them all.
a slight modification should fix your problem:
#!/bin/bash
for f in `find . -maxdepth 2 -name "*.txt"`; do
mv "$f" "$(echo "$f" | sed -r 's,[^/]+(myfile),\1,')"
done
note: this sed uses , instead of / as the delimiter.
however, there are much faster ways.
here is with the rename utility, available or easily installed wherever there is bash and perl:
find . -maxdepth 2 -name "*.txt" | rename 's,[^/]+(myfile),/$1,'
here are tests on 1000 files:
for `find`; do mv 9.176s
rename 0.099s
that's 100x as fast.
John Bollinger's accepted answer is twice as fast as the OPs, but 50x as slow as this rename solution:
for|for|mv "$f" "${f//}" 4.316s
also, it won't work if there is a directory with too many items for a shell glob. likewise any answers that use for f in *.txt or for f in */*.txt or find * or rename ... subdir*/*. answers that begin with find ., on the other hand, will also work on directories with any number of items.
I am trying to write a bash command that will rename all the files in the current directory by omitting the last 3 characters. I am not sure if it is possible thats why I am asking here.
I have a lots of files named like this : 720-1458907789605.ts
I need to rename all of them by omitting last 3 characters to obtain from 720-1458907789605.ts ---> 720-1458907789.ts for all files in the current directory.
Is it possible using bash commands? I am new to bash scripts.
Thank you!
Native bash solution:
for f in *.ts; do
[[ -f "$f" ]] || continue # if you do not need to rename directories
mv "$f" "${f:: -6}.ts"
done
This solution is slow if you have really many files: star-expansion in for will take up memory and time.
Ref: bash substring extraction.
If you have a really large data set, a bit more complex but faster solution will be:
find . -type f -name '*.ts' -depth 1 -print0 | while read -d $\0 f; do
mv "$f" "${f%???.ts}.ts"
done
With Larry Wall's rename:
rename -n 's/...\.ts$/.ts/' *.ts
If everything looks okay remove dry run option -n.
Part of my Bash script's intended function is to accept a directory name and then iterate through every file.
Here is part of my code:
#! /bin/bash
# sameln --- remove duplicate copies of files in specified directory
D=$1
cd $D #go to directory specified as default input
fileNum=0 #save file numbers
DIR=".*|*"
for f in $DIR #for every file in the directory
do
files[$fileNum]=$f #save that file into the array
fileNum=$((fileNum+1)) #increment the fileNum
echo aFile
done
The echo statement is for testing purposes. I passed as an argument the name of a directory with four regular files, and I expected my output to look like:
aFile
aFile
aFile
aFile
but the echo statement only shows up once.
A single operation
Use find for this, it's perfect for it.
find <dirname> -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec echo "{}" \;
The flags explained: maxdepth defines how deep int he hierarchy you want to look (dirs in dirs in dirs), type f defines files, as opposed to type d for dirs. And exec allows you to process the found file/dir, which is can be accessed through {}. You can alternatively pass it to a bash function to perform more tasks.
This simple bash script takes a dir as argument and lists all it's files:
#!/bin/bash
find "$1" -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec echo "{}" \;
Note that the last line is identical to find "$1" -maxdepth 1 -type f -print0.
Performing multiple tasks
Using find one can also perform multiple tasks by either piping to xargs or while read, but I prefer to use a function. An example:
#!/bin/bash
function dostuff {
# echo filename
echo "filename: $1"
# remove extension from file
mv "$1" "${1%.*}"
# get containing dir of file
dir="${1%/*}"
# get filename without containing dirs
file="${1##*/}"
# do more stuff like echoing results
echo "containing dir = $dir and file was called $file"
}; export -f dostuff
# export the function so you can call it in a subshell (important!!!)
find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec bash -c 'dostuff "{}"' \;
Note that the function needs to be exported, as you can see. This so you can call it in a subshell, which will be opened by executing bash -c 'dostuff'. To test it out, I suggest your comment to mv command in dostuff otherwise you will remove all your extensions haha.
Also note that this is safe for weird characters like spaces in filenames so no worries there.
Closing note
If you decide to go with the find command, which is a great choice, I advise you read up on it because it is a very powerful tool. A simple man find will teach you a lot and you will learn a lot of useful options to find. You can for instance quit from find once it has found a result, this can be handy to check if dirs contain videos or not for example in a rapid way. It's truly an amazing tool that can be used on various occasions and often you'll be done with a one liner (kinda like awk).
You can directly read the files into the array, then iterate through them:
#! /bin/bash
cd $1
files=(*)
for f in "${files[#]}"
do
echo $f
done
If you are iterating only files below a single directory, you are better off using simple filename/path expansion to avoid certain uncommon filename issues. The following will iterate through all files in a given directory passed as the first argument (default ./):
#!/bin/bash
srchdir="${1:-.}"
for i in "$srchdir"/*; do
printf " %s\n" "$i"
done
If you must iterate below an entire subtree that includes numerous branches, then find will likely be your only choice. However, be aware that using find or ls to populate a for loop brings with it the potential for problems with embedded characters such as a \n within a filename, etc. See Why for i in $(find . -type f) # is wrong even though unavoidable at times.
I wanted to write a short script with the following structure:
find the right folders
cd into them
replace an item
So my problem is that I get the right folders from findbut I don't know how to do the action for every line findis giving me. I tried it with a for loop like this:
for item in $(find command)
do magic for item
done
but the problem is that this command will print the relative pathnames, and if there is a space within my path it will split the path at this point.
I hope you understood my problem and can give me a hint.
You can run commands with -exec option of find directly:
find . -name some_name -exec your_command {} \;
One way to do it is:
find command -print0 |
while IFS= read -r -d '' item ; do
... "$item" ...
done
-print0 and read ... -d '' cause the NUL character to be used to separate paths, and ensure that the code works for all paths, including ones that contain spaces and newlines. Setting IFS to empty and using the -r option to read prevents the paths from being modified by read.
Note that the while loop runs in a subshell, so variables set within it will not be visible after the loop completes. If that is a problem, one way to solve it is to use process substitution instead of a pipe:
while IFS= ...
...
done < <(find command -print0)
Another option, if you have got Bash 4.2 or later, is to use the lastpipe option (shopt -s lastpipe) to cause the last command in pipelines to be run in the current shell.
If the pattern you want to find is simple enough and you have bash 4 you may not need find. In that case, you could use globstar instead for recursive globbing:
#!/bin/bash
shopt -s globstar
for directory in **/*pattern*/; do
(
cd "$directory"
do stuff
)
done
The parentheses make each operation happen in a subshell. That may have performance cost, but usually doesn't, and means you don't have to remember to cd back each time.
If globstar isn't an option (because your find instructions are not a simple pattern, or because you don't have a shell that supports it) you can use find in a similar way:
find . -whatever -exec bash -c 'cd "$1" && do stuff' _ {} \;
You could use + instead of ; to pass multiple arguments to bash each time, but doing one directory per shell (which is what ; would do) has similar benefits and costs to using the subshell expression above.
I'm looping through certain files (all files starting with MOVIE) in a folder with this bash script code:
for i in MY-FOLDER/MOVIE*
do
which works fine when there are files in the folder. But when there aren't any, it somehow goes on with one file which it thinks is named MY-FOLDER/MOVIE*.
How can I avoid it to enter the things after
do
if there aren't any files in the folder?
With the nullglob option.
$ shopt -s nullglob
$ for i in zzz* ; do echo "$i" ; done
$
for i in $(find MY-FOLDER/MOVIE -type f); do
echo $i
done
The find utility is one of the Swiss Army knives of linux. It starts at the directory you give it and finds all files in all subdirectories, according to the options you give it.
-type f will find only regular files (not directories).
As I wrote it, the command will find files in subdirectories as well; you can prevent that by adding -maxdepth 1
Edit, 8 years later (thanks for the comment, #tadman!)
You can avoid the loop altogether with
find . -type f -exec echo "{}" \;
This tells find to echo the name of each file by substituting its name for {}. The escaped semicolon is necessary to terminate the command that's passed to -exec.
for file in MY-FOLDER/MOVIE*
do
# Skip if not a file
test -f "$file" || continue
# Now you know it's a file.
...
done