I have a small bug and don't know how to solve it. I want to copy files from a big folder with many files, where the files contain a specific string. For this I use grep, ack or (in this example) ag. When I'm inside the folder it matches without problem, but when I want to do it with a loop over the files in the following script it doesn't loop over the matches. Here my script:
ag -l "${SEARCH_QUERY}" "${INPUT_DIR}" | while read -d $'\0' file; do
echo "$file"
cp "${file}" "${OUTPUT_DIR}/${file}"
done
SEARCH_QUERY holds the String I want to find inside the files, INPUT_DIR is the folder where the files are located, OUTPUT_DIR is the folder where the found files should be copied to. Is there something wrong with the while do?
EDIT:
Thanks for the suggestions! I took this one now, because it also looks for files in subfolders and saves a list with all the files.
ag -l "${SEARCH_QUERY}" "${INPUT_DIR}" > "output_list.txt"
while read file
do
echo "${file##*/}"
cp "${file}" "${OUTPUT_DIR}/${file##*/}"
done < "output_list.txt"
Better implement it like below with a find command:
find "${INPUT_DIR}" -name "*.*" | xargs grep -l "${SEARCH_QUERY}" > /tmp/file_list.txt
while read file
do
echo "$file"
cp "${file}" "${OUTPUT_DIR}/${file}"
done < /tmp/file_list.txt
rm /tmp/file_list.txt
or another option:
grep -l "${SEARCH_QUERY}" "${INPUT_DIR}/*.*" > /tmp/file_list.txt
while read file
do
echo "$file"
cp "${file}" "${OUTPUT_DIR}/${file}"
done < /tmp/file_list.txt
rm /tmp/file_list.txt
if you do not mind doing it in just one line, then
grep -lr 'ONE\|TWO\|THREE' | xargs -I xxx -P 0 cp xxx dist/
guide:
-l just print file name and nothing else
-r search recursively the CWD and all sub-directories
match these works alternatively: 'ONE' or 'TWO' or 'THREE'
| pipe the output of grep to xargs
-I xxx name of the files is saved in xxx it is just an alias
-P 0 run all the command (= cp) in parallel (= as fast as possible)
cp each file xxx to the dist directory
If i understand the behavior of ag correctly, then you have to
adjust the read delimiter to '\n' or
use ag -0 -l to force delimiting by '\0'
to solve the problem in your loop.
Alternatively, you can use the following script, that is based on find instead of ag.
while read file; do
echo "$file"
cp "$file" "$OUTPUT_DIR/$file"
done < <(find "$INPUT_DIR" -name "*$SEARCH_QUERY*" -print)
I have a lot of files that are named as: MM-DD-YYYY.pdf. I want to rename them as YYYY-MM-DD.pdf I’m sure there is some bash magic to do this. What is it?
For files in the current directory:
for name in ./??-??-????.pdf; do
if [[ "$name" =~ (.*)/([0-9]{2})-([0-9]{2})-([0-9]{4})\.pdf ]]; then
echo mv "$name" "${BASH_REMATCH[1]}/${BASH_REMATCH[4]}-${BASH_REMATCH[3]}-${BASH_REMATCH[2]}.pdf"
fi
done
Recursively, in or under the current directory:
find . -type f -name '??-??-????.pdf' -exec bash -c '
for name do
if [[ "$name" =~ (.*)/([0-9]{2})-([0-9]{2})-([0-9]{4})\.pdf ]]; then
echo mv "$name" "${BASH_REMATCH[1]}/${BASH_REMATCH[4]}-${BASH_REMATCH[3]}-${BASH_REMATCH[2]}.pdf"
fi
done' bash {} +
Enabling the globstar shell option in bash lets us do the following (will also, like the above solution, handle all files in or below the current directory):
shopt -s globstar
for name in **/??-??-????.pdf; do
if [[ "$name" =~ (.*)/([0-9]{2})-([0-9]{2})-([0-9]{4})\.pdf ]]; then
echo mv "$name" "${BASH_REMATCH[1]}/${BASH_REMATCH[4]}-${BASH_REMATCH[3]}-${BASH_REMATCH[2]}.pdf"
fi
done
All three of these solutions uses a regular expression to pick out the relevant parts of the filenames, and then rearranges these parts into the new name. The only difference between them is how the list of pathnames is generated.
The code prefixes mv with echo for safety. To actually rename files, remove the echo (but run at least once with echo to see that it does what you want).
A direct approach example from the command line:
$ ls
10-01-2018.pdf 11-01-2018.pdf 12-01-2018.pdf
$ ls [0-9]*-[0-9]*-[0-9]*.pdf|sed -r 'p;s/([0-9]{2})-([0-9]{2})-([0-9]{4})/\3-\1-\2/'|xargs -n2 mv
$ ls
2018-10-01.pdf 2018-11-01.pdf 2018-12-01.pdf
The ls output is piped to sed , then we use the p flag to print the argument without modifications, in other words, the original name of the file, and s to perform and output the conversion.
The ls + sed result is a combined output that consist of a sequence of old_file_name and new_file_name.
Finally we pipe the resulting feed through xargs to get the effective rename of the files.
From xargs man:
-n number Execute command using as many standard input arguments as possible, up to number arguments maximum.
You can use the following command very close to the one of klashxx:
for f in *.pdf; do echo "$f"; mv "$f" "$(echo "$f" | sed 's#\(..\)-\(..\)-\(....\)#\3-\2-\1#')"; done
before:
ls *.pdf
12-01-1998.pdf 12-03-2018.pdf
after:
ls *.pdf
1998-01-12.pdf 2018-03-12.pdf
Also if you have other pdf files that does not respect this format in your folder, what you can do is to select only the files that respect the format: MM-DD-YYYY.pdf to do so use the following command:
for f in `find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -regextype sed -regex './[0-9]\{2\}-[0-9]\{2\}-[0-9]\{4\}.pdf' | xargs -n1 basename`; do echo "$f"; mv "$f" "$(echo "$f" | sed 's#\(..\)-\(..\)-\(....\)#\3-\2-\1#')"; done
Explanations:
find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -regextype sed -regex './[0-9]\{2\}-[0-9]\{2\}-[0-9]\{4\}.pdf this find command will look only for files in the current working directory that respect your syntax and extract their basename (remove the ./ at the beginning, folders and other type of files that would have the same name are not taken into account, other *.pdf files are also ignored.
for each file you do a move and the resulting file name is computed using sed and back reference to the 3 groups for MM,DD and YYYY
For these simple filenames, using a more verbose pattern, you can simplify the body of the loop a bit:
twodigit=[[:digit:]][[:digit:]]
fourdigit="$twodigit$twodigit"
for f in $twodigit-$twodigit-$fourdigit.pdf; do
IFS=- read month day year <<< "${f%.pdf}"
mv "$f" "$year-$month-$day.pdf"
done
This is basically #Kusalananda's answer, but without the verbosity of regular-expression matching.
Using the Terminal on macOS, I want to recursively replace a word with the name of both a directory and a file name. For instance, I have an angular app and the module name is article, all of the file names, and directory names contain the word article. I've already done a find and replace to replace articles with apples in the code. Now I want to do the same with the file structure so both the file names and the directories share the same convention.
Just for information, I've already tried to use the newest Yeoman generator to create new files, but there seems to be an issue with it. The alternative is to duplicate a directory and rename all of the files, this is quite time consuming.
got it to work with the following script
var=$1
if [ -n "$var" ]; then
CRUDNAME=$1
CRUDNAMEUPPERCASE=`echo ${CRUDNAME:0:1} | tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]'`${CRUDNAME:1}
FOLDERNAME=$CRUDNAME's'
# Create new folder
cp -R modules/articles modules/$FOLDERNAME
# Do the find/replace in all the files
find modules/$FOLDERNAME -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i -e 's/Article/'$CRUDNAMEUPPERCASE'/g'
find modules/$FOLDERNAME -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i -e 's/article/'$CRUDNAME'/g'
# Delete useless files due to sed
rm modules/$FOLDERNAME/**/*-e
rm modules/$FOLDERNAME/**/**/*-e
rm modules/$FOLDERNAME/**/**/**/*-e
# Rename all the files
for file in modules/$FOLDERNAME/**/*article* ; do mv $file ${file//article/$CRUDNAME} ; done
for file in modules/$FOLDERNAME/**/**/*article* ; do mv $file ${file//article/$CRUDNAME} ; done
for file in modules/$FOLDERNAME/**/**/**/*article* ; do mv $file ${file//article/$CRUDNAME} ; done
else
echo "Usage: sh rename-module.sh [crud-name]"
fi
apparently I'm not the only one to encounter this issue
https://github.com/meanjs/generator-meanjs/issues/79
I want to write a code is shell scripting which will rename all the files of extension .txt in a current directory to extension .c .Suppose my current directory contains some 100 .txt file. This number is not fixed.
for f in *.txt; do echo mv "$f" "${f%.txt}.c"; done
Remove "echo" when you're satisfied it's working. See the bash manual for the meaning of "%" here.
See man rename. You can rename multiple files providing regexp substitution.
rename 's/\.txt$/.c/' *.txt
If you don't have rename in you system, you can use find:
find . -name '*.txt' | while read FILE; do echo mv "$FILE" "$(echo "$FILE" | sed 's/\.txt$/.c/g')"; done
Remove echo when you verify it does what you want.
awk can do this trick too:
kent$ ls *.txt|awk '{o=$0;gsub(/txt$/,"c"); print "mv "o" "$0;}'|sh
In a directory, I have a bunch of *.html files. I'd like to rename them all to *.txt
How can I do that? I use the bash shell.
If using bash, there's no need for external commands like sed, basename, rename, expr, etc.
for file in *.html
do
mv "$file" "${file%.html}.txt"
done
For an better solution (with only bash functionality, as opposed to external calls), see one of the other answers.
The following would do and does not require the system to have the rename program (although you would most often have this on a system):
for file in *.html; do
mv "$file" "$(basename "$file" .html).txt"
done
EDIT: As pointed out in the comments, this does not work for filenames with spaces in them without proper quoting (now added above). When working purely on your own files that you know do not have spaces in the filenames this will work but whenever you write something that may be reused at a later time, do not skip proper quoting.
rename 's/\.html$/\.txt/' *.html
does exactly what you want.
This worked for me on OSX from .txt to .txt_bak
find . -name '*.txt' -exec sh -c 'mv "$0" "${0%.txt}.txt_bak"' {} \;
You want to use rename :
rename -S <old_extension> <new_extension> <files>
rename -S .html .txt *.html
This does exactly what you want - it will change the extension from .html to .txt for all files matching *.html.
Note: Greg Hewgill correctly points out this is not a bash builtin; and is a separate Linux command. If you just need something on Linux this should work fine; if you need something more cross-platform then take a look at one of the other answers.
On a Mac...
Install rename if you haven't: brew install rename
rename -S .html .txt *.html
For Ubuntu Users :
rename 's/\.html$/\.txt/' *.html
This is the slickest solution I've found that works on OSX and Linux, and it works nicely with git too!
find . -name "*.js" -exec bash -c 'mv "$1" "${1%.js}".tsx' - '{}' \;
and with git:
find . -name "*.js" -exec bash -c 'git mv "$1" "${1%.js}".tsx' - '{}' \;
This question explicitly mentions Bash, but if you happen to have ZSH available it is pretty simple:
zmv '(*).*' '$1.txt'
If you get zsh: command not found: zmv then simply run:
autoload -U zmv
And then try again.
Thanks to this original article for the tip about zmv.
Here is an example of the rename command:
rename -n ’s/\.htm$/\.html/’ *.htm
The -n means that it's a test run and will not actually change any files. It will show you a list of files that would be renamed if you removed the -n. In the case above, it will convert all files in the current directory from a file extension of .htm to .html.
If the output of the above test run looked ok then you could run the final version:
rename -v ’s/\.htm$/\.html/’ *.htm
The -v is optional, but it's a good idea to include it because it is the only record you will have of changes that were made by the rename command as shown in the sample output below:
$ rename -v 's/\.htm$/\.html/' *.htm
3.htm renamed as 3.html
4.htm renamed as 4.html
5.htm renamed as 5.html
The tricky part in the middle is a Perl substitution with regular expressions, highlighted below:
rename -v ’s/\.htm$/\.html/’ *.htm
One line, no loops:
ls -1 | xargs -L 1 -I {} bash -c 'mv $1 "${1%.*}.txt"' _ {}
Example:
$ ls
60acbc4d-3a75-4090-85ad-b7d027df8145.json ac8453e2-0d82-4d43-b80e-205edb754700.json
$ ls -1 | xargs -L 1 -I {} bash -c 'mv $1 "${1%.*}.txt"' _ {}
$ ls
60acbc4d-3a75-4090-85ad-b7d027df8145.txt ac8453e2-0d82-4d43-b80e-205edb754700.txt
The command mmv seems to do this task very efficiently on a huge number of files (tens of thousands in a second). For example, to rename all .xml files to .html files, use this:
mmv ";*.xml" "#1#2.html"
the ; will match the path, the * will match the filename, and these are referred to as #1 and #2 in the replacement name.
Answers based on exec or pipes were either too slow or failed on a very large number of files.
In Linux or window git bash or window's wsl, try below command to change every file's extension in current directory or sub-directories or even their sub-directories with just one line of code
find . -depth -name "*.html" -exec sh -c 'mv "$1" "${1%.html}.txt"' _ {} \;
Try this
rename .html .txt *.html
usage:
rename [find] [replace_with] [criteria]
After someone else's website crawl, I ended up with thousands of files missing the .html extension, across a wide tree of subdirectories.
To rename them all in one shot, except the files already having a .html extension (most of them had none at all), this worked for me:
cd wwwroot
find . -xtype f \! -iname *.html -exec mv -iv "{}" "{}.html" \; # batch rename files to append .html suffix IF MISSING
In the OP's case I might modify that slightly, to only rename *.txt files, like so:
find . -xtype f -iname *.txt -exec filename="{}" mv -iv ${filename%.*}.{txt,html} \;
Broken down (hammertime!):
-iname *.txt
- Means consider ONLY files already ending in .txt
mv -iv "{}.{txt,html}"
- When find passes a {} as the filename, ${filename%.*} extracts its basename without any extension to form the parameters to mv. bash takes the {txt,html} to rewrite it as two parameters so the final command runs as: mv -iv "filename.txt" "filename.html"
Fix needed though: dealing with spaces in filenames
This is a good way to modify multiple extensions at once:
for fname in *.{mp4,avi}
do
mv -v "$fname" "${fname%.???}.mkv"
done
Note: be careful at the extension size to be the same (the ???)
Rename file extensions for all files under current directory and sub directories without any other packages (only use shell script):
Create a shell script rename.sh under current directory with the following code:
#!/bin/bash
for file in $(find . -name "*$1"); do
mv "$file" "${file%$1}$2"
done
Run it by ./rename.sh .old .new.
Eg. ./rename.sh .html .txt
A bit late to the party. You could do it with xargs:
ls *.html | xargs -I {} sh -c 'mv $1 `basename $1 .html`.txt' - {}
Or if all your files are in some folder
ls folder/*.html | xargs -I {} sh -c 'mv $1 folder/`basename $1 .html`.txt' - {}
Similarly to what was suggested before, this is how I did it:
find . -name '*OldText*' -exec sh -c 'mv "$0" "${0/OldText/NewText}"' {} \;
I first validated with
find . -name '*OldText*' -exec sh -c 'echo mv "$0" "${0/OldText/NewText}"' {} \;
Nice & simple!
find . -iname *.html -exec mv {} "$(basename {} .html).text" \;
If you prefer PERL, there is a short PERL script (originally written by Larry Wall, the creator of PERL) that will do exactly what you want here:
tips.webdesign10.com/files/rename.pl.txt.
For your example the following should do the trick:
rename.pl 's/html/txt/' *.html
The easiest way is to use rename.ul it is present in most of the Linux distro
rename.ul -o -v [oldFileExtension] [newFileExtension] [expression to search for file to be applied with]
rename.ul -o -v .oldext .newext *.oldext
Options:
-o: don't overwrite preexisting .newext
-v: verbose
-n: dry run
Unfortunately it's not trivial to do portably. You probably need a bit of expr magic.
for file in *.html; do echo mv -- "$file" "$(expr "$file" : '\(.*\)\.html').txt"; done
Remove the echo once you're happy it does what you want.
Edit: basename is probably a little more readable for this particular case, although expr is more flexible in general.
Here is what i used to rename .edge files to .blade.php
for file in *.edge; do mv "$file" "$(basename "$file" .edge).blade.php"; done
Works like charm.
You can also make a function in Bash, add it to .bashrc or something and then use it wherever you want.
change-ext() {
for file in *.$1; do mv "$file" "$(basename "$file" .$1).$2"; done
}
Usage:
change-ext css scss
Source of code in function: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1224786/6732111
Here is a solution, using AWK. Make sure the files are present in the working directory. Else, cd to the directory where the html files are located and then execute the below command:
for i in $(ls | grep .html); do j=$(echo $i | grep -oh "^\w*." | awk '{print $1"txt"}'); mv $i $j; done
I wrote this code in my .bashrc
alias find-ext='read -p "Path (dot for current): " p_path; read -p "Ext (unpunctured): " p_ext1; find $p_path -type f -name "*."$p_ext1'
alias rename-ext='read -p "Path (dot for current): " p_path; read -p "Ext (unpunctured): " p_ext1; read -p "Change by ext. (unpunctured): " p_ext2; echo -en "\nFound files:\n"; find $p_path -type f -name "*.$p_ext1"; find $p_path -type f -name "*.$p_ext1" -exec sh -c '\''mv "$1" "${1%.'\''$p_ext1'\''}.'\''$p_ext2'\''" '\'' _ {} \;; echo -en "\nChanged Files:\n"; find $p_path -type f -name "*.$p_ext2";'
In a folder like "/home/<user>/example-files" having this structure:
/home/<user>/example-files:
file1.txt
file2.txt
file3.pdf
file4.csv
The commands would behave like this:
~$ find-text
Path (dot for current): example-files/
Ext (unpunctured): txt
example-files/file1.txt
example-files/file2.txt
~$ rename-text
Path (dot for current): ./example-files
Ext (unpunctured): txt
Change by ext. (unpunctured): mp3
Found files:
./example-files/file1.txt
./example-files/file1.txt
Changed Files:
./example-files/file1.mp3
./example-files/file1.mp3
~$
You could use a tool designed for renaming files in bulk, e.g. renamer.
To rename all file extensions in the current folder:
$ renamer --find ".html" --replace ".txt" --dry-run *
Many more usage examples here.