Automating a rename files bash script

Question

I have a lot of documents on my drive with the .odt extension. Example:

However, I find the .odt distracting when browsing through a lot of documents.

So, I managed to write this script (removeODT.sh):

#!/bin/bash

for file in *.odt
do
 mv "$file" "${file%.odt}"
done

Which removes the .odt extension from .odt files in the directory that I execute the script in.

e.g. Open terminal in ~/Desktop/MyDocuments and type

sh /home/user1/BashScripts/removeODT.sh

This removes the .odt extension from all the files in MyDocuments.

But after removing the extension, I can't use the files on other operating systems, and also can't search the contents of the document with loook.

So to remedy that, I created a second script to add the .odt extension back when needed (addODT.sh):

#!/bin/bash

for file in *
do
 mv "$file" "${file%}.odt"
done

Now, what I'd like to do is to make those scripts change every document in the specified parent directory and all of its sub-directories instead of only a single directory as they do now.

e.g. "Remove .odt extensions from files in Documents and all of its sub-folders "

This would allow me to change all of my files with a single script without having to execute the script for each folder separately. But I'm quite new to this so I have no idea how to go about it.

P.S. An ideal solution would be to hide the .odt extension in Nautilus but as far as I know it's not possible.

Answer 1

You can use find to walk directories recursively.

find -type f -exec mv {} {}.odt \;

Removing the extension is kind of more problematic:

find -name '*.odt' -exec bash -c 'f={}; mv "$f" "${f%.odt}"' \;

But you can also create a script to remove the extension and call it from find to make it simpler:

find -name '*.odt' -exec remove_odt.sh {} \;

As you can guess, {} will be replaced by each file's name with exec, the final \; says where the command to execute ends.

Also, don't use sh to run bash scripts, sh and bash are different beasts.