Find multiple files and rename them in Linux

I am having files like a_dbg.txt, b_dbg.txt ... in a Suse 10 system. I want to write a bash shell script which should rename these files by removing "_dbg" from them.

Google suggested me to use rename command. So I executed the command rename _dbg.txt .txt *dbg* on the CURRENT_FOLDER

My actual CURRENT_FOLDER contains the below files.

CURRENT_FOLDER/a_dbg.txt
CURRENT_FOLDER/b_dbg.txt
CURRENT_FOLDER/XX/c_dbg.txt
CURRENT_FOLDER/YY/d_dbg.txt

After executing the rename command,

CURRENT_FOLDER/a.txt
CURRENT_FOLDER/b.txt
CURRENT_FOLDER/XX/c_dbg.txt
CURRENT_FOLDER/YY/d_dbg.txt

Its not doing recursively, how to make this command to rename files in all subdirectories. Like XX and YY I will be having so many subdirectories which name is unpredictable. And also my CURRENT_FOLDER will be having some other files also.

You can use find to find all matching files recursively:

$ find . -iname "*dbg*" -exec rename _dbg.txt .txt '{}' \;

---

EDIT: what the '{}' and \; are?

The -exec argument makes find execute rename for every matching file found. '{}' will be replaced with the path name of the file. The last token, \; is there only to mark the end of the exec expression.

All that is described nicely in the man page for find:

 -exec utility [argument ...] ;
         True if the program named utility returns a zero value as its
         exit status.  Optional arguments may be passed to the utility.
         The expression must be terminated by a semicolon (``;'').  If you
         invoke find from a shell you may need to quote the semicolon if
         the shell would otherwise treat it as a control operator.  If the
         string ``{}'' appears anywhere in the utility name or the argu-
         ments it is replaced by the pathname of the current file.
         Utility will be executed from the directory from which find was
         executed.  Utility and arguments are not subject to the further
         expansion of shell patterns and constructs.

For renaming recursively I use the following commands:

find -iname \*.* | rename -v "s/ /-/g"

small script i wrote to replace all files with .txt extension to .cpp extension under /tmp and sub directories recursively

#!/bin/bash

for file in $(find /tmp -name '*.txt')
do
  mv $file $(echo "$file" | sed -r 's|.txt|.cpp|g')
done

with bash:

shopt -s globstar nullglob
rename _dbg.txt .txt **/*dbg*

find -execdir rename also works for non-suffix replacements on basenames

https://stackoverflow.com/a/16541670/895245 works directly only for suffixes, but this will work for arbitrary regex replacements on basenames:

PATH=/usr/bin find . -depth -execdir rename 's/_dbg.txt$/_.txt' '{}' \;

or to affect files only:

PATH=/usr/bin find . -type f -execdir rename 's/_dbg.txt$/_.txt' '{}' \;

-execdir first cds into the directory before executing only on the basename.

Tested on Ubuntu 20.04, find 4.7.0, rename 1.10.

Convenient and safer helper for it

find-rename-regex() (
  set -eu
  find_and_replace="$1"
  PATH="$(echo "$PATH" | sed -E 's/(^|:)[^\/][^:]*//g')" \
    find . -depth -execdir rename "${2:--n}" "s/${find_and_replace}" '{}' \;
)

GitHub upstream.

Sample usage to replace spaces ' ' with hyphens '-'.

Dry run that shows what would be renamed to what without actually doing it:

find-rename-regex ' /-/g'

Do the replace:

find-rename-regex ' /-/g' -v

Command explanation

The awesome -execdir option does a cd into the directory before executing the rename command, unlike -exec.

-depth ensure that the renaming happens first on children, and then on parents, to prevent potential problems with missing parent directories.

-execdir is required because rename does not play well with non-basename input paths, e.g. the following fails:

rename 's/findme/replaceme/g' acc/acc

The PATH hacking is required because -execdir has one very annoying drawback: find is extremely opinionated and refuses to do anything with -execdir if you have any relative paths in your PATH environment variable, e.g. ./node_modules/.bin, failing with:

> find: The relative path ‘./node_modules/.bin’ is included in the PATH environment variable, which is insecure in combination with the -execdir action of find. Please remove that entry from $PATH

See also: https://askubuntu.com/questions/621132/why-using-the-execdir-action-is-insecure-for-directory-which-is-in-the-path/1109378#1109378

-execdir is a GNU find extension to POSIX. rename is Perl based and comes from the rename package.

Rename lookahead workaround

If your input paths don't come from find, or if you've had enough of the relative path annoyance, we can use some Perl lookahead to safely rename directories as in:

git ls-files | sort -r | xargs rename 's/findme(?!.*\/)\/?$/replaceme/g' '{}'

I haven't found a convenient analogue for -execdir with xargs: https://superuser.com/questions/893890/xargs-change-working-directory-to-file-path-before-executing/915686

The sort -r is required to ensure that files come after their respective directories, since longer paths come after shorter ones with the same prefix.

Tested in Ubuntu 18.10.

Script above can be written in one line:

find /tmp -name "*.txt" -exec bash -c 'mv $0 $(echo "$0" | sed -r \"s|.txt|.cpp|g\")' '{}' \;

If you just want to rename and don't mind using an external tool, then you can use rnm. The command would be:

#on current folder
rnm -dp -1 -fo -ssf '_dbg' -rs '/_dbg//' *

-dp -1 will make it recursive to all subdirectories.

-fo implies file only mode.

-ssf '_dbg' searches for files with _dbg in the filename.

-rs '/_dbg//' replaces _dbg with empty string.

You can run the above command with the path of the CURRENT_FOLDER too:

rnm -dp -1 -fo -ssf '_dbg' -rs '/_dbg//' /path/to/the/directory

You can use this below.

rename --no-act 's/\.html$/\.php/' *.html */*.html

This command worked for me. Remember first to install the perl rename package:

find -iname \*.* | grep oldname | rename -v "s/oldname/newname/g

To expand on the excellent answer @CiroSantilliПутлерКапут六四事 : do not match files in the find that we don't have to rename.

I have found this to improve performance significantly on Cygwin.

Please feel free to correct my ineffective bash coding.

FIND_STRING="ZZZZ"
REPLACE_STRING="YYYY"

FIND_PARAMS="-type d"

find-rename-regex() (
  set -eu
  find_and_replace="${1}/${2}/g"
  echo "${find_and_replace}"
  find_params="${3}"
  mode="${4}"
  if [ "${mode}" = 'real' ]; then
    PATH="$(echo "$PATH" | sed -E 's/(^|:)[^\/][^:]*//g')" \
      find . -depth -name "*${1}*" ${find_params} -execdir rename -v "s/${find_and_replace}" '{}' \;
  elif [ "${mode}" = 'dryrun' ]; then
    echo "${mode}"
    PATH="$(echo "$PATH" | sed -E 's/(^|:)[^\/][^:]*//g')" \
      find . -depth -name "*${1}*" ${find_params} -execdir rename -n "s/${find_and_replace}" '{}' \;
  fi
)

find-rename-regex "${FIND_STRING}" "${REPLACE_STRING}" "${FIND_PARAMS}" "dryrun"
# find-rename-regex "${FIND_STRING}" "${REPLACE_STRING}" "${FIND_PARAMS}" "real"

classic solution:

for f in $(find . -name "*dbg*"); do mv $f $(echo $f | sed 's/_dbg//'); done