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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!

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  • Just a heads-up: that for loop won't work in files/folders with names that contain spaces! You should use something like what steeldriver suggests in his answer. – user180409 Nov 14 '14 at 20:19
  • well, I might consider to start using python for stuff like this, but can you first point me to some materials on how to set it up? I can use windows cmd, anything. I am looking for something that I will use in future, i thought git bash is good enough to start with. – sskular Nov 15 '14 at 11:07
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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.

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  • When I run this in bash, it says: find: invalid predicate `-execdir' when I run only find command, it can't find any file, and there are files in there, in subdirectories. I am using git bash installed on my windows machine. – sskular Nov 15 '14 at 11:03
  • Thanks for the hint on the find command, it must have been too late for me to think properly, don't know how I missed it. Here is the code with which I managed to pull it off: for file in $(find -name "*.report") do mv "$file" "${file/LP_/LPP_}" done If you could provide some more details around your answer, and maybe include this approach in the answer as well and I will then mark your answer as the best answer. Thanks for the help!! – sskular Nov 15 '14 at 11:25
  • @sskular there are 2 issues with the code in your comment above: (1) it will break if any of the paths contains a space (word splitting); and (2) it will try to rename the first instance of LP_ anywhere in the path so will also break if any of the subdirectory names happens to include the string LP_. If it works for your case that's fine - but it's not a robust solution in general. – steeldriver Nov 15 '14 at 13:32

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