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Rename multiple files based on pattern in Unix
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Closed 5 years ago.
Write a simple script that will automatically rename a number of files. As an example we want the file *001.jpg renamed to user defined string + 001.jpg (ex: MyVacation20110725_001.jpg) The usage for this script is to get the digital camera photos to have file names that make some sense.
I need to write a shell script for this. Can someone suggest how to begin?
An example to help you get off the ground.
for f in *.jpg; do mv "$f" "$(echo "$f" | sed s/IMG/VACATION/)"; done
In this example, I am assuming that all your image files contain the string IMG and you want to replace IMG with VACATION.
The shell automatically evaluates *.jpg to all the matching files.
The second argument of mv (the new name of the file) is the output of the sed command that replaces IMG with VACATION.
If your filenames include whitespace pay careful attention to the "$f" notation. You need the double-quotes to preserve the whitespace.
You can use rename utility to rename multiple files by a pattern. For example following command will prepend string MyVacation2011_ to all the files with jpg extension.
rename 's/^/MyVacation2011_/g' *.jpg
or
rename <pattern> <replacement> <file-list>
this example, I am assuming that all your image files begin with "IMG" and you want to replace "IMG" with "VACATION"
solution : first identified all jpg files and then replace keyword
find . -name '*jpg' -exec bash -c 'echo mv $0 ${0/IMG/VACATION}' {} \;
for file in *.jpg ; do mv $file ${file//IMG/myVacation} ; done
Again assuming that all your image files have the string "IMG" and you want to replace "IMG" with "myVacation".
With bash you can directly convert the string with parameter expansion.
Example: if the file is IMG_327.jpg, the mv command will be executed as if you do mv IMG_327.jpg myVacation_327.jpg. And this will be done for each file found in the directory matching *.jpg.
IMG_001.jpg -> myVacation_001.jpg
IMG_002.jpg -> myVacation_002.jpg
IMG_1023.jpg -> myVacation_1023.jpg
etcetera...
find . -type f |
sed -n "s/\(.*\)factory\.py$/& \1service\.py/p" |
xargs -p -n 2 mv
eg will rename all files in the cwd with names ending in "factory.py" to be replaced with names ending in "service.py"
explanation:
In the sed cmd, the -n flag will suppress normal behavior of echoing input to output after the s/// command is applied, and the p option on s/// will force writing to output if a substitution is made. Since a sub will only be made on match, sed will only have output for files ending in "factory.py"
In the s/// replacement string, we use "& " to interpolate the entire matching string, followed by a space character, into the replacement. Because of this, it's vital that our RE matches the entire filename. after the space char, we use "\1service.py" to interpolate the string we gulped before "factory.py", followed by "service.py", replacing it. So for more complex transformations youll have to change the args to s/// (with an re still matching the entire filename)
Example output:
foo_factory.py foo_service.py
bar_factory.py bar_service.py
We use xargs with -n 2 to consume the output of sed 2 delimited strings at a time, passing these to mv (i also put the -p option in there so you can feel safe when running this). voila.
NOTE: If you are facing more complicated file and folder scenarios, this post explains find (and some alternatives) in greater detail.
Another option is:
for i in *001.jpg
do
echo "mv $i yourstring${i#*001.jpg}"
done
remove echo after you have it right.
Parameter substitution with # will keep only the last part, so you can change its name.
Can't comment on Susam Pal's answer but if you're dealing with spaces, I'd surround with quotes:
for f in *.jpg; do mv "$f" "`echo $f | sed s/\ /\-/g`"; done;
You can try this:
for file in *.jpg;
do
mv $file $somestring_${file:((-7))}
done
You can see "parameter expansion" in man bash to understand the above better.
I am using find in a loop to search recursively for files of a specific extension, and then do something with that loop.
cd $DSJobs
jobs=$(find $DSJobs -name "*.dsx")
for j in jobs; do
echo "$j"
done
assuming $DSJobs is a relevent folder, the output of $j is "Jobs" one time. doesn't even repeat.
I want to list all *.dsx files in a folder recursively through subfolders as well.
How do Make this work?
Thanks
The idiomatic way to do this is:
cd "$DSJobs"
find . -name "*.dsx" -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d "" job; do
echo "$job"
done
The complication derives from the fact that space and newline are perfectly valid filename characters, so you get find to output the filenames separated by the null character (which is not allowed to appear in a filename). Then you tell read to use the null character (with -d "") as the delimiter while reading the names.
IFS= read -r var is the way to get bash to read the characters verbatim, without dropping any leading/trailing whitespace or any backslashes.
There are further complications regarding the use of the pipe, which may or may not matter to you depending on what you do inside the loop.
Note: take care to quote your variables, unless you know exactly when to leave the quotes off. Very detailed discussion here.
Having said that, bash can do this without find:
shopt -s globstar
cd "$DSJobs"
for job in **/*.dsx; do
echo "$job"
done
This approach removes all the complications of find | while read.
Incorporating #Gordon's comment:
shopt -s globstar nullglob
for job in "$DSJobs"/**/*.dsx; do
do_stuff_with "$job"
done
The "nullglob" setting is useful when no files match the pattern. Without it, the for loop will have a single iteration where job will have the value job='/path/to/DSJobs/**/*.dsx' (or whatever the contents of the variable) -- including the literal asterisks.
Since all you want is to find files with a specific extension...
find ${DSJobs} -name "*.dsx"
Want to do this for several directories?
for d in <some list of directories>; do
find ${d} -name ""*.dsx"
done
Want to do something interesting with the files?
find ${DSJobs} -name "*.dsx" -exec dostuffwith.sh "{}" \;
I need to look for and replace certain strings for all files in a directory, including sub-directories. I think I'm nearly there using the following method which illustrates my general approach. I do much more inside the -exec than just this replace, but have removed this for clarity.
#!/bin/bash
#call with params: in_directory out_directory
in_directory=$1
out_directory=$2
export in_directory
export out_directory
#Duplicate the in_directory folder structure in out_directory
cd "$in_directory" &&
find . -type d -exec mkdir -p -- "$out_directory"/{} \;
find $in_directory -type f -name '*' -exec sh -c '
for file do
#Quite a lot of other stuff, including some fiddling with $file to
#get rel_file, the part of the path to a file from
#in_directory. E.g if in_directory is ./ then file ./ABC/123.txt
#will have rel_file ABC/123.txt
cat $file|tr -d '|' |sed -e 's/,/|/g' > $out_directory/$rel_file
done
' sh {} +
One issue is likely how I've tried to write the file to pipe the output to. However, this isn't the main/only issue as when I replace it with an explicit test path I still get the error
|sed -e 's/,/|/g' |No such file or directory
which makes me think the cat $file part is the problem?
Any help is massively appreciated as always - this is only the second BASH script I've ever had to write so I expect I've made a fairly basic mistake!
Your "inner" single quotes are being seen as "outer" single quotes and causing you problems. You think you are quoting the | in the tr command but what you are actually doing is ending the initial single-quoted string having an unquoted | and then starting a new single-quoted string. That second single-quoted string then ends at the single-quote that you believe is starting the sed script but is instead ending the previous single-quoted string, etc.
Use double quotes for those embedded single quotes if you can. Where you can't do that you have to use the '\'' sequence to get a literal single-quote in the single-quoted string.
i mean getting rid of special chars in filenames, etc.
i have made a script, that can recursively rename files [http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=kXeHbDQw]:
e.g.: before:
THIS i.s my file (1).txt
after running the script:
This-i-s-my-file-1.txt
Ok. here it is:
But: when i wanted to test it "fully", with filenames like this:
¤¥¦§¨©ª«¬®¯°±²³´µ¶·¸¹º»¼½¾¿ÀÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÊËÌÎÏÐÑÒÔÕ×ØÙUÛUÝÞßàâãäåæçèêëìîïðñòôõ÷øùûýþÿ.txt
áíüűúöőóéÁÍÜŰÚÖŐÓÉ!"#$%&'()*+,:;<=>?#[\]^_`{|}~€‚ƒ„…†‡ˆ‰Š‹ŒŽ‘’“”•–—˜™š›œžŸ¡¢£.txt
it fails [http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=iu8Pwrnr]:
$ sh renamer.sh directorythathasthefiles
mv: cannot stat `./áíüűúöőóéÁÍÜŰÚÖŐÓÉ!"#$%&\'()*+,:;<=>?#[]^_`{|}~€‚ƒ„…†‡ˆ‰Š‹ŒŽ‘’“”•–—˜™š›œžŸ¡¢£': No such file or directory
mv: cannot stat `./áíüűúöőóéÁÍÜŰÚÖŐÓÉ!"#$%&\'()*+,:;<=>?#[]^_`{|}~€‚ƒ„…†‡ˆ‰Š‹ŒŽ‘’“”•–—˜™š›œžŸ¡¢£': No such file or directory
mv: cannot stat `./áíüűúöőóéÁÍÜŰÚÖŐÓÉ!"#$%&\'()*+,:;<=>?#[]^_`{|}~€‚ƒ„…†‡ˆ‰Š‹ŒŽ‘’“”•–—˜™š›œžŸ¡¢£': No such file or directory
mv: cannot stat `./áíüűúöőóéÁÍÜŰÚÖŐÓÉ!"#$%&\'()*+,:;<=>?#[]^_`{|}~€‚ƒ„…†‡ˆ‰Š‹ŒŽ‘’“”•–—˜™š›œžŸ¡¢£': No such file or directory
mv: cannot stat `./áíüűúöőóéÁÍÜŰÚÖŐÓÉ!"#$%&\'()*+,:;<=>?#[]^_`{|}~€‚ƒ„…†‡ˆ‰Š‹ŒŽ‘’“”•–—˜™š›œžŸ¡¢£': No such file or directory
mv: cannot stat `./áíüűúöőóéÁÍÜŰÚÖŐÓÉ!"#$%&\'()*+,:;<=>?#[]^_`{|}~€‚ƒ„…†‡ˆ‰Š‹ŒŽ‘’“”•–—˜™š›œžŸ¡¢£': No such file or directory
mv: cannot stat `./áíüűúöőóéÁÍÜŰÚÖŐÓÉ!"#$%&\'()*+,:;<=>?#[]^_`{|}~€‚ƒ„…†....and so on
$
so "mv" can't handle special chars.. :\
i worked on it for many hours..
does anyone has a working one? [that can handle chars [filenames] in that 2 lines too?]
mv handles special characters just fine. Your script doesn't.
In no particular order:
You are using find to find all directories, and ls each directory separately.
Why use for DEPTH in... if you can do exactly the same with one command?
find -maxdepth 100 -type d
Which makes the arbitrary depth limit unnecessary
find -type d
Don't ever parse the output of ls, especially if you can let find handle that, too
find -not -type d
Make sure it works in the worst possible case:
find -not -type d -print0 | while read -r -d '' FILENAME; do
This stops read from eating certain escapes and choking on filenames with new-line characters.
You are repeating the entire ls | replace cycle for every single character. Don't - it kills performance. Loop over each directory all files once, and just use multiple sed's, or multiple replacements in one sed command.
sed 's/á/a/g; s/í/i/g; ...'
(I was going to suggest sed 'y/áí/ai/', but unfortunately that doesn't seem to work with Unicode. Perhaps perl -CS -Mutf8 -pe 'y/áí/ai/' would.)
You're still thinking in ASCII: "other special chars - ASCII Codes 33.. ..255". Don't.
These days, most systems use Unicode in UTF-8 encoding, which has a much wider range of "special" characters - so big that listing them out one by one becomes pointless. (It is even multibyte - "e" is one byte, "ė" is three bytes.)
True ASCII has 128 characters. What you currently have in mind are the ISO 8859 character sets (sometimes called "ANSI") - in particular, ISO 8859-1. But they go all the way up to 8859-16, and only the "ASCII" part stays the same.
echo -n $(command) is rather useless.
There are much easier ways to find the directory and basename given a path. For example, you can do
directory=$(dirname "$path")
oldnname=$(basename "$path")
# filter $oldname
mv "$path" "$directory/$newname"
Do not use egrep to check for errors. Check the program's return code. (Like you already do with cd.)
And instead of filtering out other errors, do...
if [[ -e $directory/$newname ]]; then
echo "target already exists, skipping: $oldname -> $newname"
continue
else
mv "$path" "$directory/$newname"
fi
The ton of sed 's/------------/-/g' calls can be changed to a single regexp:
sed -r 's/-{2,}/-/g'
The [ ]s in tr [foo] [bar] are unnecessary. They just cause tr to replace [ to [, and ] to ].
Seriously?
echo "$FOLDERNAME" | sed "s/$/\//g"
How about this instead?
echo "$FOLDERNAME/"
And finally, use detox.
Try something like:
find . -print0 -type f | awk 'BEGIN {RS="\x00"} { printf "%s\x00", $0; gsub("[^[:alnum:]]", "-"); printf "%s\0", $0 }' | xargs -0 -L 2 mv
Use of xargs(1) will ensure that each filename passed exactly as one parameter. awk(1) is used to add new filename right after old one.
One more trick: sed -e 's/-+/-/g' will replace groups of more than one "-" with exactly one.
Assuming the rest of your script is right, your problem is that you are using read but you should use read -r. Notice how the backslash disappeared:
áíüűúöőóéÁÍÜŰÚÖŐÓÉ!"#$%&'()*+,:;<=>?#[\]^_`{|}~€‚ƒ„…†‡ˆ‰Š‹ŒŽ‘’“”•–—˜™š›œžŸ¡¢£.txt
áíüűúöőóéÁÍÜŰÚÖŐÓÉ!"#$%&\'()*+,:;<=>?#[]^_`{|}~€‚ƒ„…†‡ˆ‰Š‹ŒŽ‘’“”•–—˜™š›œžŸ¡¢£
Ugh...
Some tips to clean up your script:
** Use sed to do translation on multiple characters at once, that'll clean things up and make it easier to manage:
dev:~$ echo 'áàaieeé!.txt' | sed -e 's/[áàã]/a/g; s/[éè]/e/g'
aaaieee!.txt
** rather than renaming the file for each change, run all your filters then do one move
$ NEWNAME='áàaieeé!.txt'
$ NEWNAME="$(echo "$NEWNAME" | sed -e 's/[áàã]/a/g; s/[éè]/e/g')"
$ NEWNAME="$(echo "$NEWNAME" | sed -e 's/aa*/a/g')"
$ echo $NEWNAME
aieee!.txt
** rather than doing a ls | read ... loop, use:
for OLDNAME in $DIR/*; do
blah
blah
blah
done
** separate out your path traversal and renaming logic into two scripts. One script finds the files which need to be renamed, one script handles the normalization of a single file. Once you learn the 'find' command, you'll realize you can toss the first script :)
I'm trying to copy a bunch of files below a directory and a number of the files have spaces and single-quotes in their names. When I try to string together find and grep with xargs, I get the following error:
find .|grep "FooBar"|xargs -I{} cp "{}" ~/foo/bar
xargs: unterminated quote
Any suggestions for a more robust usage of xargs?
This is on Mac OS X 10.5.3 (Leopard) with BSD xargs.
You can combine all of that into a single find command:
find . -iname "*foobar*" -exec cp -- "{}" ~/foo/bar \;
This will handle filenames and directories with spaces in them. You can use -name to get case-sensitive results.
Note: The -- flag passed to cp prevents it from processing files starting with - as options.
find . -print0 | grep --null 'FooBar' | xargs -0 ...
I don't know about whether grep supports --null, nor whether xargs supports -0, on Leopard, but on GNU it's all good.
The easiest way to do what the original poster wants is to change the delimiter from any whitespace to just the end-of-line character like this:
find whatever ... | xargs -d "\n" cp -t /var/tmp
This is more efficient as it does not run "cp" multiple times:
find -name '*FooBar*' -print0 | xargs -0 cp -t ~/foo/bar
I ran into the same problem. Here's how I solved it:
find . -name '*FoooBar*' | sed 's/.*/"&"/' | xargs cp ~/foo/bar
I used sed to substitute each line of input with the same line, but surrounded by double quotes. From the sed man page, "...An ampersand (``&'') appearing in the replacement is replaced by the string matching the RE..." -- in this case, .*, the entire line.
This solves the xargs: unterminated quote error.
This method works on Mac OS X v10.7.5 (Lion):
find . | grep FooBar | xargs -I{} cp {} ~/foo/bar
I also tested the exact syntax you posted. That also worked fine on 10.7.5.
Just don't use xargs. It is a neat program but it doesn't go well with find when faced with non trivial cases.
Here is a portable (POSIX) solution, i.e. one that doesn't require find, xargs or cp GNU specific extensions:
find . -name "*FooBar*" -exec sh -c 'cp -- "$#" ~/foo/bar' sh {} +
Note the ending + instead of the more usual ;.
This solution:
correctly handles files and directories with embedded spaces, newlines or whatever exotic characters.
works on any Unix and Linux system, even those not providing the GNU toolkit.
doesn't use xargs which is a nice and useful program, but requires too much tweaking and non standard features to properly handle find output.
is also more efficient (read faster) than the accepted and most if not all of the other answers.
Note also that despite what is stated in some other replies or comments quoting {} is useless (unless you are using the exotic fishshell).
Look into using the --null commandline option for xargs with the -print0 option in find.
For those who relies on commands, other than find, eg ls:
find . | grep "FooBar" | tr \\n \\0 | xargs -0 -I{} cp "{}" ~/foo/bar
find | perl -lne 'print quotemeta' | xargs ls -d
I believe that this will work reliably for any character except line-feed (and I suspect that if you've got line-feeds in your filenames, then you've got worse problems than this). It doesn't require GNU findutils, just Perl, so it should work pretty-much anywhere.
I have found that the following syntax works well for me.
find /usr/pcapps/ -mount -type f -size +1000000c | perl -lpe ' s{ }{\\ }g ' | xargs ls -l | sort +4nr | head -200
In this example, I am looking for the largest 200 files over 1,000,000 bytes in the filesystem mounted at "/usr/pcapps".
The Perl line-liner between "find" and "xargs" escapes/quotes each blank so "xargs" passes any filename with embedded blanks to "ls" as a single argument.
Frame challenge — you're asking how to use xargs. The answer is: you don't use xargs, because you don't need it.
The comment by user80168 describes a way to do this directly with cp, without calling cp for every file:
find . -name '*FooBar*' -exec cp -t /tmp -- {} +
This works because:
the cp -t flag allows to give the target directory near the beginning of cp, rather than near the end. From man cp:
-t, --target-directory=DIRECTORY
copy all SOURCE arguments into DIRECTORY
The -- flag tells cp to interpret everything after as a filename, not a flag, so files starting with - or -- do not confuse cp; you still need this because the -/-- characters are interpreted by cp, whereas any other special characters are interpreted by the shell.
The find -exec command {} + variant essentially does the same as xargs. From man find:
-exec command {} +
This variant of the -exec action runs the specified command on
the selected files, but the command line is built by appending
each selected file name at the end; the total number of invoca‐
matched files. The command line is built in much the same way
that xargs builds its command lines. Only one instance of `{}'
is allowed within the command, and (when find is being invoked
from a shell) it should be quoted (for example, '{}') to protect
it from interpretation by shells. The command is executed in
the starting directory. If any invocation returns a non-zero
value as exit status, then find returns a non-zero exit status.
If find encounters an error, this can sometimes cause an immedi‐
ate exit, so some pending commands may not be run at all. This
variant of -exec always returns true.
By using this in find directly, this avoids the need of a pipe or a shell invocation, such that you don't need to worry about any nasty characters in filenames.
With Bash (not POSIX) you can use process substitution to get the current line inside a variable. This enables you to use quotes to escape special characters:
while read line ; do cp "$line" ~/bar ; done < <(find . | grep foo)
Be aware that most of the options discussed in other answers are not standard on platforms that do not use the GNU utilities (Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, for instance). See the POSIX specification for 'standard' xargs behaviour.
I also find the behaviour of xargs whereby it runs the command at least once, even with no input, to be a nuisance.
I wrote my own private version of xargs (xargl) to deal with the problems of spaces in names (only newlines separate - though the 'find ... -print0' and 'xargs -0' combination is pretty neat given that file names cannot contain ASCII NUL '\0' characters. My xargl isn't as complete as it would need to be to be worth publishing - especially since GNU has facilities that are at least as good.
For me, I was trying to do something a little different. I wanted to copy my .txt files into my tmp folder. The .txt filenames contain spaces and apostrophe characters. This worked on my Mac.
$ find . -type f -name '*.txt' | sed 's/'"'"'/\'"'"'/g' | sed 's/.*/"&"/' | xargs -I{} cp -v {} ./tmp/
If find and xarg versions on your system doesn't support -print0 and -0 switches (for example AIX find and xargs) you can use this terribly looking code:
find . -name "*foo*" | sed -e "s/'/\\\'/g" -e 's/"/\\"/g' -e 's/ /\\ /g' | xargs cp /your/dest
Here sed will take care of escaping the spaces and quotes for xargs.
Tested on AIX 5.3
I created a small portable wrapper script called "xargsL" around "xargs" which addresses most of the problems.
Contrary to xargs, xargsL accepts one pathname per line. The pathnames may contain any character except (obviously) newline or NUL bytes.
No quoting is allowed or supported in the file list - your file names may contain all sorts of whitespace, backslashes, backticks, shell wildcard characters and the like - xargsL will process them as literal characters, no harm done.
As an added bonus feature, xargsL will not run the command once if there is no input!
Note the difference:
$ true | xargs echo no data
no data
$ true | xargsL echo no data # No output
Any arguments given to xargsL will be passed through to xargs.
Here is the "xargsL" POSIX shell script:
#! /bin/sh
# Line-based version of "xargs" (one pathname per line which may contain any
# amount of whitespace except for newlines) with the added bonus feature that
# it will not execute the command if the input file is empty.
#
# Version 2018.76.3
#
# Copyright (c) 2018 Guenther Brunthaler. All rights reserved.
#
# This script is free software.
# Distribution is permitted under the terms of the GPLv3.
set -e
trap 'test $? = 0 || echo "$0 failed!" >& 2' 0
if IFS= read -r first
then
{
printf '%s\n' "$first"
cat
} | sed 's/./\\&/g' | xargs ${1+"$#"}
fi
Put the script into some directory in your $PATH and don't forget to
$ chmod +x xargsL
the script there to make it executable.
bill_starr's Perl version won't work well for embedded newlines (only copes with spaces). For those on e.g. Solaris where you don't have the GNU tools, a more complete version might be (using sed)...
find -type f | sed 's/./\\&/g' | xargs grep string_to_find
adjust the find and grep arguments or other commands as you require, but the sed will fix your embedded newlines/spaces/tabs.
I used Bill Star's answer slightly modified on Solaris:
find . -mtime +2 | perl -pe 's{^}{\"};s{$}{\"}' > ~/output.file
This will put quotes around each line. I didn't use the '-l' option although it probably would help.
The file list I was going though might have '-', but not newlines. I haven't used the output file with any other commands as I want to review what was found before I just start massively deleting them via xargs.
I played with this a little, started contemplating modifying xargs, and realised that for the kind of use case we're talking about here, a simple reimplementation in Python is a better idea.
For one thing, having ~80 lines of code for the whole thing means it is easy to figure out what is going on, and if different behaviour is required, you can just hack it into a new script in less time than it takes to get a reply on somewhere like Stack Overflow.
See https://github.com/johnallsup/jda-misc-scripts/blob/master/yargs and https://github.com/johnallsup/jda-misc-scripts/blob/master/zargs.py.
With yargs as written (and Python 3 installed) you can type:
find .|grep "FooBar"|yargs -l 203 cp --after ~/foo/bar
to do the copying 203 files at a time. (Here 203 is just a placeholder, of course, and using a strange number like 203 makes it clear that this number has no other significance.)
If you really want something faster and without the need for Python, take zargs and yargs as prototypes and rewrite in C++ or C.
You might need to grep Foobar directory like:
find . -name "file.ext"| grep "FooBar" | xargs -i cp -p "{}" .
If you are using Bash, you can convert stdout to an array of lines by mapfile:
find . | grep "FooBar" | (mapfile -t; cp "${MAPFILE[#]}" ~/foobar)
The benefits are:
It's built-in, so it's faster.
Execute the command with all file names in one time, so it's faster.
You can append other arguments to the file names. For cp, you can also:
find . -name '*FooBar*' -exec cp -t ~/foobar -- {} +
however, some commands don't have such feature.
The disadvantages:
Maybe not scale well if there are too many file names. (The limit? I don't know, but I had tested with 10 MB list file which includes 10000+ file names with no problem, under Debian)
Well... who knows if Bash is available on OS X?