In terminal I can rename a single file that starts with a dash, i.e.
mv ./-file file
I can also rename all files in a directory that start with a dash, i.e.
for f in ./-*; do rename 's/-//' "$f"; done
However, how can I do this recursively. I have tried using the find command, the rename command, and a recursive for loop. By the way, a lot of the file names have more than one dash. I would only want to remove the first dash. Thanks!
Using find and rename:
find . -iname '-*' -execdir rename -n 's:./-:./:' {} +
find . -iname '-*' matches all filenames beginning with a -, and then -execdir ... {} + runs the command with those filenames as arguments, after cding to the directory containing the files. This means that the command arguments always has filenames of the form ./-foo. Then it's easy to just match the - after the ./ in a regex.
cd to each directory that contains those files. Thanks! :)
– jbrock
Feb 13 '17 at 2:37
-(dash) because that is used as a prefix to signify parametesr for many commands. ie$ mv a -a mv: invalid option -- 'a' Try 'mv --help' for more information.– WinEunuuchs2Unix Feb 13 '17 at 2:18for f in ./-* ; do ....(this has many advantages, such as giving you possibility to give "$f" to any program without fearing it takes the filename as options. but there are other advantages as well, which I won't go into details here (look for stephaneChazelas answers, one has a lot of relevant details)) – Olivier Dulac Feb 15 '17 at 9:48s/-//instead ofs/^-//– Olivier Dulac Feb 15 '17 at 18:30