It seems like I am unable to find a direct answer to this question.
I appreciate your help.
I'm trying to find all files with a specific name in a directory, read the last 1000 lines of the file and copy it in to a new file in the same directory. As an example:
Find all files names xyz.log in the current directory, copy the last 1000 lines to file abc.log (which doesn't exist).
I tried to use the following command with no luck:
find . -name "xyz.log" -execdir tail -1000 {} > abc.log \;
The problem I'm having is that for all the files in the current directory, they all write to abc.log in the CURRENT directory and not in the directory where xyz.log resides. Clearly the find with execdir is first executed and then the output is redirected to abc.log.
Can you guys suggest a way to fix this? I appreciate any information/help.
EDIT- I tried find . -name "xyz.log" -execdir sh -c "tail -1000 {} > abc.log" \; as suggested by some of the friends, but it gives me this error: sh: ./tail: No such file or directory error message. Do you guys have any idea what the problem is?
Luckily the solution to use -printf is working fine.
The simplest way is this:
find . -name "xyz.log" -execdir sh -c 'tail -1000 "{}" >abc.log' \;
A more flexible alternative is to first print out the commands and then execute them all with sh:
find . -name "xyz.log" -printf 'tail -1000 "%p" >"%h/abc.log"\n' | sh
You can remove the | sh from the end when you're trying it out/debugging.
There is a bug in some versions of findutils (4.2 and 4.3, though it was fixed in some 4.2.x and 4.3.x versions) that cause execdir arguments that contain {} to be prefixed with ./ (instead of the prefix being applied only to {} it is applied to the whole quoted string). To work around this you can use:
find . -name "xyz.log" -execdir sh -c 'tail -1000 "$1" >abc.log' sh {} \;
sh -c 'script' arg0 arg1 runs the sh script with arg0, arg1, etc. passed to it. By convention, arg0 is the name of the executable (here, "sh"). From the script you can access the arguments using $0 (corresponding to "sh"), $1 (corresponding to find's expansion of {}), etc.
The redirect isn't passed into execdir, so abc.log shows up in the directory you run the command in. -execdir also doesn't like embedded redirects. but you can workaround the problem by passing -execdir a shell command with a redirect embedded, like this:
find . -name "xyz.log" -execdir sh -c '/usr/bin/tail -1000 {} > abc.log' \;
Much credit to this blog post (not mine):
http://www.microhowto.info/howto/act_on_all_files_in_a_directory_tree_using_find.html
Edit
I put the full path to tail in the command (assuming it's in /usr/bin on your system), since sh may load a .profile with a PATH that differs from your current shell.
Here's another non-find (well, sorta - it still uses find but doesn't try to shoehorn find into doing the whole thing):
while read f
do
d=$(dirname "${f}")
tail -n 1000 "${f}" > "${d}/abc.log"
done < <(find . -type f -name xyz.log -print)
I have a folder with more than 5000 images, all with JPG extension.
What i want to do, is to add recursively the "thumb_" prefix to all images.
I found a similar question: Rename Files and Directories (Add Prefix) but i only want to add the prefix to files with the JPG extension.
One of possibly solutions:
find . -name '*.jpg' -printf "'%p' '%h/thumb_%f'\n" | xargs -n2 echo mv
Principe: find all needed files, and prepare arguments for the standard mv command.
Notes:
arguments for the mv are surrounded by ' for allowing spaces in filenames.
The drawback is: this will not works with filenames what are containing ' apostrophe itself, like many mp3 files. If you need moving more strange filenames check bellow.
the above command is for dry run (only shows the mv commands with args). For real work remove the echo pretending mv.
ANY filename renaming. In the shell you need a delimiter. The problem is, than the filename (stored in a shell variable) usually can contain the delimiter itself, so:
mv $file $newfile #will fail, if the filename contains space, TAB or newline
mv "$file" "$newfile" #will fail, if the any of the filenames contains "
the correct solution are either:
prepare a filename with a proper escaping
use a scripting language what easuly understands ANY filename
Preparing the correct escaping in bash is possible with it's internal printf and %q formatting directive = print quoted. But this solution is long and boring.
IMHO, the easiest way is using perl and zero padded print0, like next.
find . -name \*.jpg -print0 | perl -MFile::Basename -0nle 'rename $_, dirname($_)."/thumb_".basename($_)'
The above using perl's power to mungle the filenames and finally renames the files.
Beware of filenames with spaces in (the for ... in ... expression trips over those), and be aware that the result of a find . ... will always start with ./ (and hence try to give you names like thumb_./file.JPG which isn't quite correct).
This is therefore not a trivial thing to get right under all circumstances. The expression I've found to work correctly (with spaces, subdirs and all that) is:
find . -iname \*.JPG -exec bash -c 'mv "$1" "`echo $1 | sed \"s/\(.*\)\//\1\/thumb/\"`"' -- '{}' \;
Even that can fall foul of certain names (with quotes in) ...
In OS X 10.8.5, find does not have the -printf option. The port that contained rename seemed to depend upon a WebkitGTK development package that was taking hours to install.
This one line, recursive file rename script worked for me:
find . -iname "*.jpg" -print | while read name; do cur_dir=$(dirname "$name"); cur_file=$(basename "$name"); mv "$name" "$cur_dir/thumb_$cur_file"; done
I was actually renaming CakePHP view files with an 'admin_' prefix, to move them all to an admin section.
You can use that same answer, just use *.jpg, instead of just *.
for file in *.JPG; do mv $file thumb_$file; done
if it's multiple directory levels under the current one:
for file in $(find . -name '*.JPG'); do mv $file $(dirname $file)/thumb_$(basename $file); done
proof:
jcomeau#intrepid:/tmp$ mkdir test test/a test/a/b test/a/b/c
jcomeau#intrepid:/tmp$ touch test/a/A.JPG test/a/b/B.JPG test/a/b/c/C.JPG
jcomeau#intrepid:/tmp$ cd test
jcomeau#intrepid:/tmp/test$ for file in $(find . -name '*.JPG'); do mv $file $(dirname $file)/thumb_$(basename $file); done
jcomeau#intrepid:/tmp/test$ find .
.
./a
./a/b
./a/b/thumb_B.JPG
./a/b/c
./a/b/c/thumb_C.JPG
./a/thumb_A.JPG
jcomeau#intrepid:/tmp/test$
Use rename for this:
rename 's/(\w{1})\.JPG$/thumb_$1\.JPG/' `find . -type f -name *.JPG`
For only jpg files in current folder
for f in `ls *.jpg` ; do mv "$f" "PRE_$f" ; done
How can we find specific type of files i.e. doc pdf files present in nested directories.
command I tried:
$ ls -R | grep .doc
but if there is a file name like alok.doc.txt the command will display that too which is obviously not what I want. What command should I use instead?
If you are more confortable with "ls" and "grep", you can do what you want using a regular expression in the grep command (the ending '$' character indicates that .doc must be at the end of the line. That will exclude "file.doc.txt"):
ls -R |grep "\.doc$"
More information about using grep with regular expressions in the man.
ls command output is mainly intended for reading by humans. For advanced querying for automated processing, you should use more powerful find command:
find /path -type f \( -iname "*.doc" -o -iname "*.pdf" \)
As if you have bash 4.0++
#!/bin/bash
shopt -s globstar
shopt -s nullglob
for file in **/*.{pdf,doc}
do
echo "$file"
done
find . | grep "\.doc$"
This will show the path as well.
Some of the other methods that can be used:
echo *.{pdf,docx,jpeg}
stat -c %n * | grep 'pdf\|docx\|jpeg'
We had a similar question. We wanted a list - with paths - of all the config files in the etc directory. This worked:
find /etc -type f \( -iname "*.conf" \)
It gives a nice list of all the .conf file with their path. Output looks like:
/etc/conf/server.conf
But, we wanted to DO something with ALL those files, like grep those files to find a word, or setting, in all the files. So we use
find /etc -type f \( -iname "*.conf" \) -print0 | xargs -0 grep -Hi "ServerName"
to find via grep ALL the config files in /etc that contain a setting like "ServerName" Output looks like:
/etc/conf/server.conf: ServerName "default-118_11_170_172"
Hope you find it useful.
Sid
Similarly if you prefer using the wildcard character * (not quite like the regex suggestions) you can just use ls with both the -l flag to list one file per line (like grep) and the -R flag like you had. Then you can specify the files you want to search for with *.doc
I.E. Either
ls -l -R *.doc
or if you want it to list the files on fewer lines.
ls -R *.doc
If you have files with extensions that don't match the file type, you could use the file utility.
find $PWD -type f -exec file -N \{\} \; | grep "PDF document" | awk -F: '{print $1}'
Instead of $PWD you can use the directory you want to start the search in. file prints even out he PDF version.
I have to rename a complete folder tree recursively so that no uppercase letter appears anywhere (it's C++ source code, but that shouldn't matter).
Bonus points for ignoring CVS and Subversion version control files/folders. The preferred way would be a shell script, since a shell should be available on any Linux box.
There were some valid arguments about details of the file renaming.
I think files with the same lowercase names should be overwritten; it's the user's problem. When checked out on a case-ignoring file system, it would overwrite the first one with the latter, too.
I would consider A-Z characters and transform them to a-z, everything else is just calling for problems (at least with source code).
The script would be needed to run a build on a Linux system, so I think changes to CVS or Subversion version control files should be omitted. After all, it's just a scratch checkout. Maybe an "export" is more appropriate.
Smaller still I quite like:
rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/' *
On case insensitive filesystems such as OS X's HFS+, you will want to add the -f flag:
rename -f 'y/A-Z/a-z/' *
A concise version using the "rename" command:
find my_root_dir -depth -exec rename 's/(.*)\/([^\/]*)/$1\/\L$2/' {} \;
This avoids problems with directories being renamed before files and trying to move files into non-existing directories (e.g. "A/A" into "a/a").
Or, a more verbose version without using "rename".
for SRC in `find my_root_dir -depth`
do
DST=`dirname "${SRC}"`/`basename "${SRC}" | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`
if [ "${SRC}" != "${DST}" ]
then
[ ! -e "${DST}" ] && mv -T "${SRC}" "${DST}" || echo "${SRC} was not renamed"
fi
done
P.S.
The latter allows more flexibility with the move command (for example, "svn mv").
for f in `find`; do mv -v "$f" "`echo $f | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`"; done
Just simply try the following if you don't need to care about efficiency.
zip -r foo.zip foo/*
unzip -LL foo.zip
One can simply use the following which is less complicated:
rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/' *
This works on CentOS/Red Hat Linux or other distributions without the rename Perl script:
for i in $( ls | grep [A-Z] ); do mv -i "$i" "`echo $i | tr 'A-Z' 'a-z'`"; done
Source: Rename all file names from uppercase to lowercase characters
(In some distributions the default rename command comes from util-linux, and that is a different, incompatible tool.)
This works if you already have or set up the rename command (e.g. through brew install in Mac):
rename --lower-case --force somedir/*
The simplest approach I found on Mac OS X was to use the rename package from http://plasmasturm.org/code/rename/:
brew install rename
rename --force --lower-case --nows *
--force Rename even when a file with the destination name already exists.
--lower-case Convert file names to all lower case.
--nows Replace all sequences of whitespace in the filename with single underscore characters.
Most of the answers above are dangerous, because they do not deal with names containing odd characters. Your safest bet for this kind of thing is to use find's -print0 option, which will terminate filenames with ASCII NUL instead of \n.
Here is a script, which only alter files and not directory names so as not to confuse find:
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0n 1 bash -c \
's=$(dirname "$0")/$(basename "$0");
d=$(dirname "$0")/$(basename "$0"|tr "[A-Z]" "[a-z]"); mv -f "$s" "$d"'
I tested it, and it works with filenames containing spaces, all kinds of quotes, etc. This is important because if you run, as root, one of those other scripts on a tree that includes the file created by
touch \;\ echo\ hacker::0:0:hacker:\$\'\057\'root:\$\'\057\'bin\$\'\057\'bash
... well guess what ...
Here's my suboptimal solution, using a Bash shell script:
#!/bin/bash
# First, rename all folders
for f in `find . -depth ! -name CVS -type d`; do
g=`dirname "$f"`/`basename "$f" | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`
if [ "xxx$f" != "xxx$g" ]; then
echo "Renaming folder $f"
mv -f "$f" "$g"
fi
done
# Now, rename all files
for f in `find . ! -type d`; do
g=`dirname "$f"`/`basename "$f" | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`
if [ "xxx$f" != "xxx$g" ]; then
echo "Renaming file $f"
mv -f "$f" "$g"
fi
done
Folders are all renamed correctly, and mv isn't asking questions when permissions don't match, and CVS folders are not renamed (CVS control files inside that folder are still renamed, unfortunately).
Since "find -depth" and "find | sort -r" both return the folder list in a usable order for renaming, I preferred using "-depth" for searching folders.
One-liner:
for F in K*; do NEWNAME=$(echo "$F" | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'); mv "$F" "$NEWNAME"; done
Or even:
for F in K*; do mv "$F" "${F,,}"; done
Note that this will convert only files/directories starting with letter K, so adjust accordingly.
The original question asked for ignoring SVN and CVS directories, which can be done by adding -prune to the find command. E.g to ignore CVS:
find . -name CVS -prune -o -exec mv '{}' `echo {} | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'` \; -print
[edit] I tried this out, and embedding the lower-case translation inside the find didn't work for reasons I don't actually understand. So, amend this to:
$> cat > tolower
#!/bin/bash
mv $1 `echo $1 | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'`
^D
$> chmod u+x tolower
$> find . -name CVS -prune -o -exec tolower '{}' \;
Ian
Not portable, Zsh only, but pretty concise.
First, make sure zmv is loaded.
autoload -U zmv
Also, make sure extendedglob is on:
setopt extendedglob
Then use:
zmv '(**/)(*)~CVS~**/CVS' '${1}${(L)2}'
To recursively lowercase files and directories where the name is not CVS.
Using Larry Wall's filename fixer:
$op = shift or die $help;
chomp(#ARGV = <STDIN>) unless #ARGV;
for (#ARGV) {
$was = $_;
eval $op;
die $# if $#;
rename($was,$_) unless $was eq $_;
}
It's as simple as
find | fix 'tr/A-Z/a-z/'
(where fix is of course the script above)
for f in `find -depth`; do mv ${f} ${f,,} ; done
find -depth prints each file and directory, with a directory's contents printed before the directory itself. ${f,,} lowercases the file name.
This works nicely on macOS too:
ruby -e "Dir['*'].each { |p| File.rename(p, p.downcase) }"
This is a small shell script that does what you requested:
root_directory="${1?-please specify parent directory}"
do_it () {
awk '{ lc= tolower($0); if (lc != $0) print "mv \"" $0 "\" \"" lc "\"" }' | sh
}
# first the folders
find "$root_directory" -depth -type d | do_it
find "$root_directory" ! -type d | do_it
Note the -depth action in the first find.
Use typeset:
typeset -l new # Always lowercase
find $topPoint | # Not using xargs to make this more readable
while read old
do new="$old" # $new is a lowercase version of $old
mv "$old" "$new" # Quotes for those annoying embedded spaces
done
On Windows, emulations, like Git Bash, may fail because Windows isn't case-sensitive under the hood. For those, add a step that mv's the file to another name first, like "$old.tmp", and then to $new.
With MacOS,
Install the rename package,
brew install rename
Use,
find . -iname "*.py" -type f | xargs -I% rename -c -f "%"
This command find all the files with a *.py extension and converts the filenames to lower case.
`f` - forces a rename
For example,
$ find . -iname "*.py" -type f
./sample/Sample_File.py
./sample_file.py
$ find . -iname "*.py" -type f | xargs -I% rename -c -f "%"
$ find . -iname "*.py" -type f
./sample/sample_file.py
./sample_file.py
Lengthy But "Works With No Surprises & No Installations"
This script handles filenames with spaces, quotes, other unusual characters and Unicode, works on case insensitive filesystems and most Unix-y environments that have bash and awk installed (i.e. almost all). It also reports collisions if any (leaving the filename in uppercase) and of course renames both files & directories and works recursively. Finally it's highly adaptable: you can tweak the find command to target the files/dirs you wish and you can tweak awk to do other name manipulations. Note that by "handles Unicode" I mean that it will indeed convert their case (not ignore them like answers that use tr).
# adapt the following command _IF_ you want to deal with specific files/dirs
find . -depth -mindepth 1 -exec bash -c '
for file do
# adapt the awk command if you wish to rename to something other than lowercase
newname=$(dirname "$file")/$(basename "$file" | awk "{print tolower(\$0)}")
if [ "$file" != "$newname" ] ; then
# the extra step with the temp filename is for case-insensitive filesystems
if [ ! -e "$newname" ] && [ ! -e "$newname.lcrnm.tmp" ] ; then
mv -T "$file" "$newname.lcrnm.tmp" && mv -T "$newname.lcrnm.tmp" "$newname"
else
echo "ERROR: Name already exists: $newname"
fi
fi
done
' sh {} +
References
My script is based on these excellent answers:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/9496/looping-through-files-with-spaces-in-the-names
How to convert a string to lower case in Bash?
In OS X, mv -f shows "same file" error, so I rename twice:
for i in `find . -name "*" -type f |grep -e "[A-Z]"`; do j=`echo $i | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' | sed s/\-1$//`; mv $i $i-1; mv $i-1 $j; done
I needed to do this on a Cygwin setup on Windows 7 and found that I got syntax errors with the suggestions from above that I tried (though I may have missed a working option). However, this solution straight from Ubuntu forums worked out of the can :-)
ls | while read upName; do loName=`echo "${upName}" | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'`; mv "$upName" "$loName"; done
(NB: I had previously replaced whitespace with underscores using:
for f in *\ *; do mv "$f" "${f// /_}"; done
)
Slugify Rename (regex)
It is not exactly what the OP asked for, but what I was hoping to find on this page:
A "slugify" version for renaming files so they are similar to URLs (i.e. only include alphanumeric, dots, and dashes):
rename "s/[^a-zA-Z0-9\.]+/-/g" filename
I would reach for Python in this situation, to avoid optimistically assuming paths without spaces or slashes. I've also found that python2 tends to be installed in more places than rename.
#!/usr/bin/env python2
import sys, os
def rename_dir(directory):
print('DEBUG: rename('+directory+')')
# Rename current directory if needed
os.rename(directory, directory.lower())
directory = directory.lower()
# Rename children
for fn in os.listdir(directory):
path = os.path.join(directory, fn)
os.rename(path, path.lower())
path = path.lower()
# Rename children within, if this child is a directory
if os.path.isdir(path):
rename_dir(path)
# Run program, using the first argument passed to this Python script as the name of the folder
rename_dir(sys.argv[1])
If you use Arch Linux, you can install rename) package from AUR that provides the renamexm command as /usr/bin/renamexm executable and a manual page along with it.
It is a really powerful tool to quickly rename files and directories.
Convert to lowercase
rename -l Developers.mp3 # or --lowcase
Convert to UPPER case
rename -u developers.mp3 # or --upcase, long option
Other options
-R --recursive # directory and its children
-t --test # Dry run, output but don't rename
-o --owner # Change file owner as well to user specified
-v --verbose # Output what file is renamed and its new name
-s/str/str2 # Substitute string on pattern
--yes # Confirm all actions
You can fetch the sample Developers.mp3 file from here, if needed ;)
None of the solutions here worked for me because I was on a system that didn't have access to the perl rename script, plus some of the files included spaces. However, I found a variant that works:
find . -depth -exec sh -c '
t=${0%/*}/$(printf %s "${0##*/}" | tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]");
[ "$t" = "$0" ] || mv -i "$0" "$t"
' {} \;
Credit goes to "Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'", see this answer on the similar question "change entire directory tree to lower-case names" on the Unix & Linux StackExchange.
I believe the one-liners can be simplified:
for f in **/*; do mv "$f" "${f:l}"; done
( find YOURDIR -type d | sort -r;
find yourdir -type f ) |
grep -v /CVS | grep -v /SVN |
while read f; do mv -v $f `echo $f | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`; done
First rename the directories bottom up sort -r (where -depth is not available), then the files.
Then grep -v /CVS instead of find ...-prune because it's simpler.
For large directories, for f in ... can overflow some shell buffers.
Use find ... | while read to avoid that.
And yes, this will clobber files which differ only in case...
find . -depth -name '*[A-Z]*'|sed -n 's/\(.*\/\)\(.*\)/mv -n -v -T \1\2 \1\L\2/p'|sh
I haven't tried the more elaborate scripts mentioned here, but none of the single commandline versions worked for me on my Synology NAS. rename is not available, and many of the variations of find fail because it seems to stick to the older name of the already renamed path (eg, if it finds ./FOO followed by ./FOO/BAR, renaming ./FOO to ./foo will still continue to list ./FOO/BAR even though that path is no longer valid). Above command worked for me without any issues.
What follows is an explanation of each part of the command:
find . -depth -name '*[A-Z]*'
This will find any file from the current directory (change . to whatever directory you want to process), using a depth-first search (eg., it will list ./foo/bar before ./foo), but only for files that contain an uppercase character. The -name filter only applies to the base file name, not the full path. So this will list ./FOO/BAR but not ./FOO/bar. This is ok, as we don't want to rename ./FOO/bar. We want to rename ./FOO though, but that one is listed later on (this is why -depth is important).
This comand in itself is particularly useful to finding the files that you want to rename in the first place. Use this after the complete rename command to search for files that still haven't been replaced because of file name collisions or errors.
sed -n 's/\(.*\/\)\(.*\)/mv -n -v -T \1\2 \1\L\2/p'
This part reads the files outputted by find and formats them in a mv command using a regular expression. The -n option stops sed from printing the input, and the p command in the search-and-replace regex outputs the replaced text.
The regex itself consists of two captures: the part up until the last / (which is the directory of the file), and the filename itself. The directory is left intact, but the filename is transformed to lowercase. So, if find outputs ./FOO/BAR, it will become mv -n -v -T ./FOO/BAR ./FOO/bar. The -n option of mv makes sure existing lowercase files are not overwritten. The -v option makes mv output every change that it makes (or doesn't make - if ./FOO/bar already exists, it outputs something like ./FOO/BAR -> ./FOO/BAR, noting that no change has been made). The -T is very important here - it treats the target file as a directory. This will make sure that ./FOO/BAR isn't moved into ./FOO/bar if that directory happens to exist.
Use this together with find to generate a list of commands that will be executed (handy to verify what will be done without actually doing it)
sh
This pretty self-explanatory. It routes all the generated mv commands to the shell interpreter. You can replace it with bash or any shell of your liking.
Using bash, without rename:
find . -exec bash -c 'mv $0 ${0,,}' {} \;