How to change file and directory names with find? - linux

Question

I changed project name and now I have many files an directories with old name. How to replace these names with find?
find . -name "*old_name*" -exec ???

Answer 1

This find should work for you:
find . -name "old_name" -execdir mv "{}" new_name +
This will find files with the name old_name from the current dir in all sub directories and rename them to new_name.

Answer 2

Below is what I have used in the past. The biggest gotcha is the RHEL rename (c) vs Debian rename (perl) - They take different options. The example below uses RHEL c based rename command. Remove the '-type f' to also rename the directories.
find . -type f -name "*old_name*" -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} /usr/bin/rename "old_name" "new_name" {}

Answer 3

newname="myfile.sh"; for files in $(find Doc2/scripts/ -name gw_watch_err.sh); do echo $files; dir=${files%/*}; cfile=${files##*/}; echo "$dir -- $cfile"; echo "mv $cfile $newname"; done
Doc2/scripts/gateway/gw_watch_err.sh
Doc2/scripts/gateway -- gw_watch_err.sh
mv gw_watch_err.sh myfile.sh
you could also add:
find . -maxdepth 1 -iname file
where maxdepth will ensure you dont need to worry about sub folders and iname means case sensitive

Answer 4

Ok, my solution:
find . -name "*old_name*" -exec rename 's/old_name/new_name/g' {} \;
But this works for directories which name not contain "old_name", otherwise find say for example:
find: `./old_name': No such file or directory
Because it trying search in "old_name" directory, and the directory is already a "new_name"

Answer 5

renaming multiple directories with find: how to catch the catches
here's a little story on how to rename multiple files with find, but for the impatient I first put the proper command for your specific problem here:
find -depth -name "old name" -execdir mv -iv {} "new name" \;
and for the patient ones, a few misadventures with find, restricting changes to directories only:
we want to rename all directories named old dir into new dir recursively inside a current directory
we create an empty directory inside which we create a simple directory hierarchy:
$ cd $(mktemp -d) && mkdir -p "old dir" "subdir/old dir/old dir"
$ find | sort
.
./old dir
./subdir
./subdir/old dir
./subdir/old dir/old dir
the use of of the -exec action works only for a rename directly under a current directory, which you can see by dry-running a rename command (note that the shell doesn't output the quotes, which is not an error):
$ find -type d -name "old dir" -exec echo mv -iv {} "new dir" \;
mv -iv ./subdir/old dir new dir
mv -iv ./subdir/old dir/old dir new dir
mv -iv ./old dir new dir
note that only the first rename command would work as expected
the use of the -execdir action runs the command from the subdirectory containing the matched directory:
$ find -type d -name "old dir" -execdir echo mv -iv {} "new dir" \;
mv -iv ./old dir new dir
mv -iv ./old dir new dir
mv -iv ./old dir new dir
which seems fine as the rename commands are run in the matching directories, so we no longer dry-run:
$ find -type d -name "old dir" -execdir mv -iv {} "new dir" \;
'./old dir' -> 'new dir'
find: ‘./subdir/old dir’: No such file or directory
'./old dir' -> 'new dir'
find: ‘./old dir’: No such file or directory
$ find | sort
.
./new dir
./subdir
./subdir/new dir
./subdir/new dir/old dir
the problem is that the old dir is renamed new dir and find cannot descend further inside a renamed directory
a solution is to process each directory's contents before the directory itself, which is precisely what the -depth option does:
$ cd $(mktemp -d) && mkdir -p "old dir" "subdir/old dir/old dir"
$ find -depth -type d -name "old dir" -execdir mv -iv {} "new dir" \;
'./old dir' -> 'new dir'
'./old dir' -> 'new dir'
'./old dir' -> 'new dir'
$ find | sort
.
./new dir
./subdir
./subdir/new dir
./subdir/new dir/new dir

Answer 6

1. First, backup your directories and files
The following Bash code run on my OS X and Ubuntu boxes.
2. Rename the directories from old_dir to new_dir:
for d in $(find . -maxdepath X -type d -name 'old_dir'); do mv $d "$(dirname $d)/new_dir"; done
X is a number used to specify the depth of replacing old_dir
3. Rename the files from old_file to new_file:
for f in $(find . -type f -name 'old_file'); do mv $f "$(dirname $f)/new_file"; done
Don't care about #Benjamin W. and #ghoti them one for his ForMatted code and #ghoti try to orient the question to his Pitfalls.
Hi, #Benjamin W. what about this new post? and #ghoti did you run the above code incorrectly on your machine? If the code can't work just let me know or post a question pls, and if you had a better one pls post here let we know.