Linux – How to rename files and replace characters

centoslinuxrename

I have a group of files that have : (colon) within the name. I need to replace the : with - (dash).

Is there an easy way to do this in a script?

Sample FileName: 2013-10-11:11:52:08_055456663_045585_.txt

Best Answer

A simple 1-liner should do (assumes Posix sh-compatible shell):

for f in *:*; do mv -v "$f" $(echo "$f" | tr ':' '-'); done

Explanation:

for ... in ...; do ...; done is a loop
*:* matches all files and directories in the the current directory which have : in their name
f is assigned in turn to each such file name in the loop
mv renames its first argument to the second one; -v (verbose) asks it to print what it does; this option is GNU-utils specific, so it is available on Linux but not Solaris
$(...) executes the code in a sub-shell and substitutes the output
echo prints its argument to the standard output
tr reads standard output and translates the characters according to the supplied map

If you are using bash, you can avoid spawning an extra shell ($()) with sub-processes (tr) by replacing $(...) with ${f//:/-}.

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Linux – How to recursively rename files/folders to make their names Windows-friendly

Take a look at Glindra rename and detox.

Glindra file utilities can be installed on either Windows or Linux. Examples of cleaning up file names on Windows:

rena *.* -portable

rena *.* -safe

-safe
Maps leading dashes (hyphens) to underscores.
Collapses spaces.
Maps problematic characters like *?:[]"<>|(){} to underscore.
-portable
Performs the same cleanup operations as -safe, and additionally:
Maps all 8-bit characters from the upper half of the Latin 1 alphabet to reasonable 7-bit fallback characters.
Maps the single quote characters '`´ to underscore.

Source: Fixing Unix/Linux/POSIX Filenames: Control Characters (such as Newline), Leading Dashes, and Other Problems

Linux – Find and Replace String in filenames

If you can use Bash, then the following script should do what you want:

#!/bin/bash

(( $# != 2 )) && exit 1

for f in *; do
  newf="${f//$1/$2}"
  if [[ $f != $newf ]]; then
    mv "$f" "$newf"
  fi
done

It tries to replace filename with new string, if resulted filename doesn't match original, then it renames the file to resulted filename.

Usage, if saved as replacestr and given mode to be executed:

$ ./replacestr abc def

It will try to rename all. You can use [[ ! -f $f ]] to skip non-file. You can also wrap it in function and source it from your ~/.bashrc if you need this very often.

Best Answer

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Linux – How to recursively rename files/folders to make their names Windows-friendly

Linux – Find and Replace String in filenames

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