Rename all files in subdirecories

Question

I am having a problem writing a script for mass renaming of files in subdirectories.

I have a folder with multiple subfolders, and those subfolders have multiple files that I need to rename.

This is the where I got so far:

for file in $(find -name "*.report")
do
  mv "$file" "LPP_${file/LP_/}"
done

So as you can see, I need to replace the 'LP_' string in the filename with the 'LPP_'.

This is not working because of the path to the file - the strings retrieved from the find command are only file names, and don't include the path. To include the path, I am trying something like this:

for file in $(find -name "*.report")
do
  echo "$file" 
  echo "${RELPATH/\$\//}/${file/LP_/LPP_}"
done

But the RELPATH variable is prefixing a '/' character, so the mv command is complaining that it cannot move the file to /./subfolder1/LPP_filename.report

Can someone tell me what am I doing wrong, is there a better way of doing it, and explain why is there an extra '/' character in te RELPATH variable and how to remove it?

Thank you all in advance!

Answer 1

I don't really understand your issue (find should return the full path), however I suggest a different approach, perhaps something like

find -name '*.report' -execdir bash -c 'echo mv "$0" "${0/LP_/LPP_}"' {} \;

By passing the find result {} as a shell positional parameter $0 to a subordinate bash -c command, we can work around the fact that we can't do mv {} ${{}/LP_/LPP_} directly. The use of -execdir instead of the more common -exec ensures that the substitution happens only on the filename portion, in case any of the paths happens to contain the string LP_

The echo is just so you can try it out and check that the renaming looks correct - you will need to remove it to allow actual renaming.