Related
I would like to preface this with I am a complete noob with scripting. So I have a situation where I need to manually look for a phone number that could live in one of hundreds of files.
so the logs live in the following directory.
/actlogs/sbclogger_archive
The logs file names are in directories numbered 01-31 inside of that directory and all the files are zipped.
Inside of those numbered directories are tons of files but the only ones I want to search are "sipd.logthenthedate.gz" and "sipmsg.logthenthedate.gz".
So I need to look in all the files in the following directory.
"/actlogs/sbclogger_archive"
Which has 31 directories labeled "01-31"
Then in each 01-31 there is hundreds of files the only ones I want to look are are "sipd.logthenthedate.gz" and "sipmsg.logthenthedate.gz".
The script I am using is below, please let me know what I could do to make this work.
#!/bin/bash
read -p "Enter a phone number: " text
read -p "Enter directory of log file's, Hint it should be /actlogs/sbclogger_archive: " directory
#arr=( $(find $directory -type f -exec grep -l "$text" {} \; | sort -r) )
#find $directory -type f -exec grep -qe "$text" {} \; -exec bash -c '
file=$(find $directory -type f -name 'sipd.log*' -exec grep -qe "$text" {} \; -exec bash -c 'select f; do echo $f; break; done' find-sh {} +;)
if [ -z "$file" ]; then
echo "No matches found."
else
echo "select tool:"
tools=("nano" "less" "vim" "quit")
select tool in "${tools[#]}"
do
case $tool in
"quit")
break
;;
*)
$tool $file
break
;;
esac
done
fi
This would give you the list of files matching:
find \( -name 'sipd.log[0-9]*.gz' -o -name 'sipmsg.log[0-9]*.gz' \) \
-exec sh -c 'gunzip -c {}| grep -m1 -q 888333' \; -print
./18/sipd.log20200118.gz
./7/sipd.log20200107.gz
Note: -m1 tells grep to stop after first match, since you need only the file name in this case, it's enough.
If you have zgrep, you can shorten it to:
find \( -name 'sipd.log[0-9]*.gz' -o -name 'sipmsg.log[0-9]*.gz' \) \
-exec zgrep -l '888333' {} \;
./18/sipd.log20200118.gz
./7/sipd.log20200107.gz
Also, some of the tools you are suggesting do not support gzip files (nano and some variants of less for example). In which case you might need to decompress the file and compress it again when done.
And, you might want to consider a loop if you want to "quit". Feeding the file list to the tool doesn't make sense.
Note: AFAIK zgrep doesn't do recursive:
DESCRIPTION
Zgrep invokes grep on compressed or gzipped files. These grep options will cause zgrep to terminate with an
error code:
(-[drRzZ]|--di*|--exc*|--inc*|--rec*|--nu*). All other options specified are passed directly to grep. If no file is specified, then
the
standard input is decompressed if necessary and fed to grep. Otherwise the given files are uncompressed if necessary and fed to
grep.
so zgrep -rl "$text" "$directory" or zgrep -rl --include 'simpd.log*.gz' "$test" {01..31} won't work except if you have a special zgrep
As you must unzip before using your tool, i would divide the problem in two blocks.
Firstly, i would expand the paths you need (looking under <directory> for the phone <text>), and then iterate to apply the tool (because some tools like vim or nano cannot be piped).
Try something like this:
#!/bin/bash
#...
# text/directory input stuff
#...
tmpdir=$(mktemp -d)
trap 'rm -rf ${tmpdir}' EXIT
while IFS= read -r file; do
unzipped=${tmpdir}/$(basename "${file}" .gz)
gunzip -c "${file}" > "${unzipped}"
${tool} "${unzipped}"
done < <(zgrep -lw "${text}" "${directory}"/{01..31}/{sipd.logthenthedate.gz,sipmsg.logthenthedate.gz} 2>/dev/null)
Above is the proposed invert-form by Charles Duffy following this Bash FAQ.
If you prefer to iterate an array, you could build in this way:
# shellcheck disable=SC2207
files=( $(zgrep -lw "${text}" "${directory}"/{01..31}/{sipd.logthenthedate.gz,sipmsg.logthenthedate.gz} 2>/dev/null) )
for file in "${files[#]}"; do
# etc.
as in our particular case, the files to match have no spaces in their names and shellcheck warning is not so important (hidden above).
BRs
I need to write a shell script.
I have bunch of files in a directory. From there, I need to display content of files which are greater than 0 bytes in size. and delete the files which are 0 in size.
Please help. Thanks in advance.
I Found an answer which works fine. But, any more inputs will be welcome.
The answer is the following. Which I need to use in shell script.
find . -size 0c -delete
Here's something that will work
#!/bin/bash
for f in $(ls) ; do
if [ -f $f ] ; then
if [ -s $f ] ; then
ls $f
else
rm $f
fi
fi
done
Note, it's just doing ls in the current directory. You could also pass in a directory as arg to look in or other method. Also, this won't pick up hidden files (.*).
The key to how it works are the Bash conditional expressions -s (true if file is more than 0 size) and -f (true if regular file).
To display the contents of all files under topdir that have non-zero size:
find topdir -type f \! -size 0c -exec cat {} +
To delete all completely empty files under the same directory:
find topdir -type f -size 0c -ok rm {} \;
Replace -ok with -exec (and the \; at the end to +) if you don't want to confirm each removal.
This solution assumes a POSIX find.
for i in `ls` ; do
if [ -s $i ] ; then
cat $i
else
rm -f $i
fi
done
if you have spaces in you filenames you may need to change IFS env variable, or think about using "find" command instead
I have several hundred PDFs under a directory in UNIX. The names of the PDFs are really long (approx. 60 chars).
When I try to delete all PDFs together using the following command:
rm -f *.pdf
I get the following error:
/bin/rm: cannot execute [Argument list too long]
What is the solution to this error?
Does this error occur for mv and cp commands as well? If yes, how to solve for these commands?
The reason this occurs is because bash actually expands the asterisk to every matching file, producing a very long command line.
Try this:
find . -name "*.pdf" -print0 | xargs -0 rm
Warning: this is a recursive search and will find (and delete) files in subdirectories as well. Tack on -f to the rm command only if you are sure you don't want confirmation.
You can do the following to make the command non-recursive:
find . -maxdepth 1 -name "*.pdf" -print0 | xargs -0 rm
Another option is to use find's -delete flag:
find . -name "*.pdf" -delete
tl;dr
It's a kernel limitation on the size of the command line argument. Use a for loop instead.
Origin of problem
This is a system issue, related to execve and ARG_MAX constant. There is plenty of documentation about that (see man execve, debian's wiki, ARG_MAX details).
Basically, the expansion produce a command (with its parameters) that exceeds the ARG_MAX limit.
On kernel 2.6.23, the limit was set at 128 kB. This constant has been increased and you can get its value by executing:
getconf ARG_MAX
# 2097152 # on 3.5.0-40-generic
Solution: Using for Loop
Use a for loop as it's recommended on BashFAQ/095 and there is no limit except for RAM/memory space:
Dry run to ascertain it will delete what you expect:
for f in *.pdf; do echo rm "$f"; done
And execute it:
for f in *.pdf; do rm "$f"; done
Also this is a portable approach as glob have strong and consistant behavior among shells (part of POSIX spec).
Note: As noted by several comments, this is indeed slower but more maintainable as it can adapt more complex scenarios, e.g. where one want to do more than just one action.
Solution: Using find
If you insist, you can use find but really don't use xargs as it "is dangerous (broken, exploitable, etc.) when reading non-NUL-delimited input":
find . -maxdepth 1 -name '*.pdf' -delete
Using -maxdepth 1 ... -delete instead of -exec rm {} + allows find to simply execute the required system calls itself without using an external process, hence faster (thanks to #chepner comment).
References
I'm getting "Argument list too long". How can I process a large list in chunks? # wooledge
execve(2) - Linux man page (search for ARG_MAX) ;
Error: Argument list too long # Debian's wiki ;
Why do I get “/bin/sh: Argument list too long” when passing quoted arguments? # SuperUser
find has a -delete action:
find . -maxdepth 1 -name '*.pdf' -delete
Another answer is to force xargs to process the commands in batches. For instance to delete the files 100 at a time, cd into the directory and run this:
echo *.pdf | xargs -n 100 rm
If you’re trying to delete a very large number of files at one time (I deleted a directory with 485,000+ today), you will probably run into this error:
/bin/rm: Argument list too long.
The problem is that when you type something like rm -rf *, the * is replaced with a list of every matching file, like “rm -rf file1 file2 file3 file4” and so on. There is a relatively small buffer of memory allocated to storing this list of arguments and if it is filled up, the shell will not execute the program.
To get around this problem, a lot of people will use the find command to find every file and pass them one-by-one to the “rm” command like this:
find . -type f -exec rm -v {} \;
My problem is that I needed to delete 500,000 files and it was taking way too long.
I stumbled upon a much faster way of deleting files – the “find” command has a “-delete” flag built right in! Here’s what I ended up using:
find . -type f -delete
Using this method, I was deleting files at a rate of about 2000 files/second – much faster!
You can also show the filenames as you’re deleting them:
find . -type f -print -delete
…or even show how many files will be deleted, then time how long it takes to delete them:
root#devel# ls -1 | wc -l && time find . -type f -delete
100000
real 0m3.660s
user 0m0.036s
sys 0m0.552s
Or you can try:
find . -name '*.pdf' -exec rm -f {} \;
you can try this:
for f in *.pdf
do
rm "$f"
done
EDIT:
ThiefMaster comment suggest me not to disclose such dangerous practice to young shell's jedis, so I'll add a more "safer" version (for the sake of preserving things when someone has a "-rf . ..pdf" file)
echo "# Whooooo" > /tmp/dummy.sh
for f in '*.pdf'
do
echo "rm -i \"$f\""
done >> /tmp/dummy.sh
After running the above, just open the /tmp/dummy.sh file in your favorite editor and check every single line for dangerous filenames, commenting them out if found.
Then copy the dummy.sh script in your working dir and run it.
All this for security reasons.
For somone who doesn't have time.
Run the following command on terminal.
ulimit -S -s unlimited
Then perform cp/mv/rm operation.
I'm surprised there are no ulimit answers here. Every time I have this problem I end up here or here. I understand this solution has limitations but ulimit -s 65536 seems to often do the trick for me.
You could use a bash array:
files=(*.pdf)
for((I=0;I<${#files[#]};I+=1000)); do
rm -f "${files[#]:I:1000}"
done
This way it will erase in batches of 1000 files per step.
you can use this commend
find -name "*.pdf" -delete
The rm command has a limitation of files which you can remove simultaneous.
One possibility you can remove them using multiple times the rm command bases on your file patterns, like:
rm -f A*.pdf
rm -f B*.pdf
rm -f C*.pdf
...
rm -f *.pdf
You can also remove them through the find command:
find . -name "*.pdf" -exec rm {} \;
If they are filenames with spaces or special characters, use:
find -name "*.pdf" -delete
For files in current directory only:
find -maxdepth 1 -name '*.pdf' -delete
This sentence search all files in the current directory (-maxdepth 1) with extension pdf (-name '*.pdf'), and then, delete.
i was facing same problem while copying form source directory to destination
source directory had files ~3 lakcs
i used cp with option -r and it's worked for me
cp -r abc/ def/
it will copy all files from abc to def without giving warning of Argument list too long
Try this also If you wanna delete above 30/90 days (+) or else below 30/90(-) days files/folders then you can use the below ex commands
Ex: For 90days excludes above after 90days files/folders deletes, it means 91,92....100 days
find <path> -type f -mtime +90 -exec rm -rf {} \;
Ex: For only latest 30days files that you wanna delete then use the below command (-)
find <path> -type f -mtime -30 -exec rm -rf {} \;
If you wanna giz the files for more than 2 days files
find <path> -type f -mtime +2 -exec gzip {} \;
If you wanna see the files/folders only from past one month .
Ex:
find <path> -type f -mtime -30 -exec ls -lrt {} \;
Above 30days more only then list the files/folders
Ex:
find <path> -type f -mtime +30 -exec ls -lrt {} \;
find /opt/app/logs -type f -mtime +30 -exec ls -lrt {} \;
And another one:
cd /path/to/pdf
printf "%s\0" *.[Pp][Dd][Ff] | xargs -0 rm
printf is a shell builtin, and as far as I know it's always been as such. Now given that printf is not a shell command (but a builtin), it's not subject to "argument list too long ..." fatal error.
So we can safely use it with shell globbing patterns such as *.[Pp][Dd][Ff], then we pipe its output to remove (rm) command, through xargs, which makes sure it fits enough file names in the command line so as not to fail the rm command, which is a shell command.
The \0 in printf serves as a null separator for the file names wich are then processed by xargs command, using it (-0) as a separator, so rm does not fail when there are white spaces or other special characters in the file names.
Argument list too long
As this question title for cp, mv and rm, but answer stand mostly for rm.
Un*x commands
Read carefully command's man page!
For cp and mv, there is a -t switch, for target:
find . -type f -name '*.pdf' -exec cp -ait "/path to target" {} +
and
find . -type f -name '*.pdf' -exec mv -t "/path to target" {} +
Script way
There is an overall workaroung used in bash script:
#!/bin/bash
folder=( "/path to folder" "/path to anther folder" )
if [ "$1" != "--run" ] ;then
exec find "${folder[#]}" -type f -name '*.pdf' -exec $0 --run {} +
exit 0;
fi
shift
for file ;do
printf "Doing something with '%s'.\n" "$file"
done
What about a shorter and more reliable one?
for i in **/*.pdf; do rm "$i"; done
I had the same problem with a folder full of temporary images that was growing day by day and this command helped me to clear the folder
find . -name "*.png" -mtime +50 -exec rm {} \;
The difference with the other commands is the mtime parameter that will take only the files older than X days (in the example 50 days)
Using that multiple times, decreasing on every execution the day range, I was able to remove all the unnecessary files
You can create a temp folder, move all the files and sub-folders you want to keep into the temp folder then delete the old folder and rename the temp folder to the old folder try this example until you are confident to do it live:
mkdir testit
cd testit
mkdir big_folder tmp_folder
touch big_folder/file1.pdf
touch big_folder/file2.pdf
mv big_folder/file1,pdf tmp_folder/
rm -r big_folder
mv tmp_folder big_folder
the rm -r big_folder will remove all files in the big_folder no matter how many. You just have to be super careful you first have all the files/folders you want to keep, in this case it was file1.pdf
To delete all *.pdf in a directory /path/to/dir_with_pdf_files/
mkdir empty_dir # Create temp empty dir
rsync -avh --delete --include '*.pdf' empty_dir/ /path/to/dir_with_pdf_files/
To delete specific files via rsync using wildcard is probably the fastest solution in case you've millions of files. And it will take care of error you're getting.
(Optional Step): DRY RUN. To check what will be deleted without deleting. `
rsync -avhn --delete --include '*.pdf' empty_dir/ /path/to/dir_with_pdf_files/
.
.
.
Click rsync tips and tricks for more rsync hacks
I found that for extremely large lists of files (>1e6), these answers were too slow. Here is a solution using parallel processing in python. I know, I know, this isn't linux... but nothing else here worked.
(This saved me hours)
# delete files
import os as os
import glob
import multiprocessing as mp
directory = r'your/directory'
os.chdir(directory)
files_names = [i for i in glob.glob('*.{}'.format('pdf'))]
# report errors from pool
def callback_error(result):
print('error', result)
# delete file using system command
def delete_files(file_name):
os.system('rm -rf ' + file_name)
pool = mp.Pool(12)
# or use pool = mp.Pool(mp.cpu_count())
if __name__ == '__main__':
for file_name in files_names:
print(file_name)
pool.apply_async(delete_files,[file_name], error_callback=callback_error)
If you want to remove both files and directories, you can use something like:
echo /path/* | xargs rm -rf
I only know a way around this.
The idea is to export that list of pdf files you have into a file. Then split that file into several parts. Then remove pdf files listed in each part.
ls | grep .pdf > list.txt
wc -l list.txt
wc -l is to count how many line the list.txt contains. When you have the idea of how long it is, you can decide to split it in half, forth or something. Using split -l command
For example, split it in 600 lines each.
split -l 600 list.txt
this will create a few file named xaa,xab,xac and so on depends on how you split it.
Now to "import" each list in those file into command rm, use this:
rm $(<xaa)
rm $(<xab)
rm $(<xac)
Sorry for my bad english.
I ran into this problem a few times. Many of the solutions will run the rm command for each individual file that needs to be deleted. This is very inefficient:
find . -name "*.pdf" -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf
I ended up writing a python script to delete the files based on the first 4 characters in the file-name:
import os
filedir = '/tmp/' #The directory you wish to run rm on
filelist = (os.listdir(filedir)) #gets listing of all files in the specified dir
newlist = [] #Makes a blank list named newlist
for i in filelist:
if str((i)[:4]) not in newlist: #This makes sure that the elements are unique for newlist
newlist.append((i)[:4]) #This takes only the first 4 charcters of the folder/filename and appends it to newlist
for i in newlist:
if 'tmp' in i: #If statment to look for tmp in the filename/dirname
print ('Running command rm -rf '+str(filedir)+str(i)+'* : File Count: '+str(len(os.listdir(filedir)))) #Prints the command to be run and a total file count
os.system('rm -rf '+str(filedir)+str(i)+'*') #Actual shell command
print ('DONE')
This worked very well for me. I was able to clear out over 2 million temp files in a folder in about 15 minutes. I commented the tar out of the little bit of code so anyone with minimal to no python knowledge can manipulate this code.
I have faced a similar problem when there were millions of useless log files created by an application which filled up all inodes. I resorted to "locate", got all the files "located"d into a text file and then removed them one by one. Took a while but did the job!
I solved with for
I am on macOS with zsh
I moved thousands only jpg files. Within mv in one line command.
Be sure there are no spaces or special characters in the name of the files you are trying to move
for i in $(find ~/old -type f -name "*.jpg"); do mv $i ~/new; done
A bit safer version than using xargs, also not recursive:
ls -p | grep -v '/$' | grep '\.pdf$' | while read file; do rm "$file"; done
Filtering our directories here is a bit unnecessary as 'rm' won't delete it anyway, and it can be removed for simplicity, but why run something that will definitely return error?
Using GNU parallel (sudo apt install parallel) is super easy
It runs the commands multithreaded where '{}' is the argument passed
E.g.
ls /tmp/myfiles* | parallel 'rm {}'
For remove first 100 files:
rm -rf 'ls | head -100'
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
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,,}' {} \;