I want to replace double spaces with one space in the filenames of a lot of photos. These photos are located in directory /foto and it's subfolders. How to do this? For example "photo 1.jpg" needs to become "photo 1.jpg"
The best way is to use commandline, because it's on CloudLinux server. (and it is over 50GB of photos). I searched here on Stackoverflow, also Google to find the command I need. I guess rename is the one to use, or mv.
The only things I found were commands about replacing space and replacing other symbols, but not about double (multiple) spaces.
find -iname \*.* | rename -v "s/\s{2}/ /g"
This is the final command which helped me out. I used perl rename, see answer by Gilles
Use this, using Perl's rename :
rename 's/\s{2}/ /g' files*
Remove -n switch when the output looks good.
There are other tools with the same name which may or may not be able to do this, so be careful.
If you run the following command (GNU)
$ file "$(readlink -f "$(type -p rename)")"
and you have a result that contains Perl script, ASCII text executable and not containing ELF, then this seems to be the right tool =)
If not, to make it the default (usually already the case) on Debian and derivative like Ubuntu :
$ sudo update-alternatives --set rename /path/to/rename
Replace /path/to/rename to the path of your perl rename executable.
If you don't have this command, search your package manager to install it or do it manually (no deps...)
This tool was originally written by Larry Wall, the Perl's dad.
Related
There are similar questions about how to add numbers with leading zero etc. but in my case my filename has two numbers which is the number of chapter and the number of page. Both lack the leading zero, so they aren't sorted alphabetically. Using rename or any other method I want to convert files like these:
file_1_1.mp3 to file_01_01.mp3
file_1_12.mp3 to file_01_12.mp3
file_12_1.mp3 to file_12_01.mp3
...
I tried this:
rename 's/\d+/sprintf("%02d",$&)/e' *.mp3
but it just add leading zero to the chapter number.
Like this:
rename -n 's/(\d+)_(\d+)\./sprintf("%02d_%02d.", $1, $2)/e' *.mp3
Remove -n switch when the output looks good for you
Output
rename(file_1_12.mp3, file_01_12.mp3)
rename(file_1_1.mp3, file_01_01.mp3)
rename(file_12_1.mp3, file_12_01.mp3)
man rename
There are other tools with the same name which may or may not be able to do this, so be careful.
The rename command that is part of the util-linux package, won't.
If you run the following command (GNU)
$ rename
and you see perlexpr, then this seems to be the right tool.
If not, to make it the default (usually already the case) on Debian and derivative like Ubuntu :
$ sudo apt install rename
$ sudo update-alternatives --set rename /usr/bin/file-rename
For archlinux:
pacman -S perl-rename
For RedHat-family distros:
yum install prename
The 'prename' package is in the EPEL repository.
For Gentoo:
emerge dev-perl/rename
For *BSD:
pkg install gprename
or p5-File-Rename
For Mac users:
brew install rename
If you don't have this command with another distro, search your package manager to install it or do it manually (no deps...)
This tool was originally written by Larry Wall, the Perl's dad.
This shell script works:
for file in *mp3
do
new=$(echo "$file" | sed 's/_/_0/g; s/_0\([0-9][0-9]\)/_\1/g;');
mv "$file" "$new";
done;
Appends a 0 to each underscore found
Removes that 0 if it resulted in at least digits in a row
Edit: added global flag to the 2nd substitute command, per comment by #PaulHodges
I have lots of files like these:
tf_CVBV6Z_CVSA1Z_pws2_pcc1.sac
tf_CVBV5Z_CVSA2Z_pws2_pcc1.sac
tf_CVBV4Z_CVSA3Z_pws2_pcc1.sac
tf_CVBV3Z_CVSA4Z_pws2_pcc1.sac
tf_CVBV2Z_CVSA5Z_pws2_pcc1.sac
tf_CVBV1Z_CVSA6Z_pws2_pcc1.sac
and I want to change the order to end up like this:
tf_CVSA1Z_CVBV6Z_pws2_pcc1.sac
tf_CVSA2Z_CVBV5Z_pws2_pcc1.sac
tf_CVSA3Z_CVBV4Z_pws2_pcc1.sac
tf_CVSA4Z_CVBV3Z_pws2_pcc1.sac
tf_CVSA5Z_CVBV2Z_pws2_pcc1.sac
tf_CVSA6Z_CVBV1Z_pws2_pcc1.sac
I tried the rename option but it does not work.
Any thoughts?
Thanks
With perl's rename :
$ rename -n 's/(CV[^_]+)_(CV[^_]+)/$2_$1/' tf_CVSA1Z_CVBV6Z_pws2_pcc1.sac
tf_CVSA1Z_CVBV6Z_pws2_pcc1.sac -> tf_CVBV6Z_CVSA1Z_pws2_pcc1.sac
Remove -n switch when the output looks good.
There are other tools with the same name which may or may not be able to do this, so be careful.
If you run the following command (GNU)
$ file "$(readlink -f "$(type -p rename)")"
and you have a result that contains Perl script, ASCII text executable and not containing ELF, then this seems to be the right tool =)
If not, to make it the default (usually already the case) on Debian and derivative like Ubuntu :
$ sudo update-alternatives --set rename /path/to/rename
Replace /path/to/rename to the path of your perl rename executable.
If you don't have this command, search your package manager to install it or do it manually (no deps...)
This tool was originally written by Larry Wall, the Perl's dad.
Disclaimer: I am very new to Bash scripting (and Linux in general), so forgive me for a stupid question.
A friend of mine gave me a script which makes a backup copy of certain files onto Dropbox. Here's the code in full:
#!/bin/sh
DATE=`date +%Y-%m-%d`
tarname='backup-'$DATE'.tar.gz'
cd ~/
directoriesToBack='.bashrc Desktop/School/ Desktop/Research\ Project'
tar -X ~/Desktop/My\ Programs/scripts/crons/exclude.txt -zcvf $tarname $directoriesToBack
mv $tarname ~/Dropbox
The variable directoriesToBack obviously contains the directories to be copied. Exclude.txt is a text file of files which are not to be backed up.
If I try to run this script, I get an error because of Desktop/Research Project: my computer looks for the directory Desktop/Research instead. I've tried to use double quotes instead of single quotes, and to replace \ with an ordinary space, but these tries didn't work. Does anyone know how I can make a backup of a directory with spaces in its name?
Don't try to do this with strings. It will not work and it will cause pain. See I'm trying to put a command in a variable, but the complex cases always fail! for various details and discussion.
Use an array instead.
#!/bin/bash
DATE=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)
tarname=backup-$DATE.tar.gz
cd ~/
directoriesToBack=(.bashrc Desktop/School "Desktop/Research Project")
tar -X ~/Desktop/My\ Programs/scripts/crons/exclude.txt -zcvf "$tarname" "${directoriesToBack[#]}"
I also fixed the quoting of variables/etc. and used $() instead of backticks for the date command execution (as $() can be nested and generally has better semantics and behaviour).
Please run the script and show the EXACT error message. I suspect that what is going wrong is not what you think it is. I suspect that the envar directoriesToBack is not what you think it is.
cd Desktop/"Research Project" (With Quotation marks)
You'll find that a lot of code in many languages use Quotes to signify a space.
I prefer to seach with locate command but I don't know how to perform a partial search with it.
Suppose I want to search file containing the word libevent. How can I do that?
Locate searches for file names. Not file contents.
The ugly way is to use grep It'll start searching from / directory.
grep -irn 'libevent' /
The better way is to narrow down the suspected directories where this files could exists. Suppose those directories' full paths are /path/to/dir1, /path/to/dir2 etc. Then invoke the following command.
for dir in /path/to/dir1 /path/to/dir2
do
grep -irn 'libevent' $dir
done
The locate command is not searching inside the content of files like grep (and other commands) do. It is simply searching inside file paths.
locate work by using a cache index of file paths, and this index is often updated by the updatedb utility.
addenda
A useful way to search some pattern inside (the content of) some files is to use the ability of zsh or some recent versions of bash to expand the ** file pattern, like e.g.
grep foo ~/gee/**/*.[ch]
with zsh this search inside all files named *.c or *.h under $HOME/gee/ containing foo. I find this feature tremendously useful, and justifying alone the adoption of zsh as my interactive shell. With other shells you might type the much longer
find $HOME/gee -name '*.ch' | xargs grep foo
I'm trying to use something along the lines of
unexpand -t 4 *.php
but am unsure how to write this command to do what I want.
Weirdly,
unexpand -t 4 file.php > file.php
gives me an empty file. (i.e. overwriting file.php with nothing)
I can specify multiple files okay, but don't know how to then overwrite each file.
I could use my IDE, but there are ~67000 instances of to be replaced over 200 files, and this will take a while.
I expect that the answers to my question(s) will be standard unix fare, but I'm still learning...
You can very seldom use output redirection to replace the input. Replacing works with commands that support it internally (since they then do the basic steps themselves). From the shell level, it's far better to work in two steps, like so:
Do the operation on foo, creating foo.tmp
Move (rename) foo.tmp to foo, overwriting the original
This will be fast. It will require a bit more disk space, but if you do both steps before continuing to the next file, you will only need as much extra space as the largest single file, this should not be a problem.
Sketch script:
for a in *.php
do
unexpand -t 4 $a >$a-notab
mv $a-notab $a
done
You could do better (error-checking, and so on), but that is the basic outline.
Here's the command I used:
for p in $(find . -iname "*.js")
do
unexpand -t 4 $(dirname $p)/"$(basename $p)" > $(dirname $p)/"$(basename $p)-tab"
mv $(dirname $p)/"$(basename $p)-tab" $(dirname $p)/"$(basename $p)"
done
This version changes all files within the directory hierarchy rooted at the current working directory.
In my case, I only wanted to make this change to .js files; you can omit the iname clause from find if you wish, or use different args to cast your net differently.
My version wraps filenames in quotes, but it doesn't use quotes around 'interesting' directory names that appear in the paths of matching files.
To get it all on one line, add a semi after lines 1, 3, & 4.
This is potentially dangerous, so make a backup or use git before running the command. If you're using git, you can verify that only whitespace was changed with git diff -w.