Ubuntu – Recursively rename all files whose name starts with a dash

bashcommand linefindrename

In terminal I can rename a single file that starts with a dash, i.e.

mv ./-file file

I can also rename all files in a directory that start with a dash, i.e.

for f in ./-*; do rename 's/-//' "$f"; done

However, how can I do this recursively. I have tried using the find command, the rename command, and a recursive for loop. By the way, a lot of the file names have more than one dash. I would only want to remove the first dash. Thanks!

Best Answer

Using find and rename:

find . -iname '-*' -execdir rename -n 's:./-:./:' {} +

find . -iname '-*' matches all filenames beginning with a -, and then -execdir ... {} + runs the command with those filenames as arguments, after cding to the directory containing the files. This means that the command arguments always has filenames of the form ./-foo. Then it's easy to just match the - after the ./ in a regex.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Script to rename files

for f in IM*.BMP; do
    n1=${f:2:1}
    n2=${f:3:3}
    new="cam$(( n1 + 1 ))-$(( 10#$n2 )).BMP"
    echo mv "$f" "$new"
done

$(( ... )) is an arithmetic expansion. The 10#$n2 forces the contents of the n2 variable to be handled as a base-10 number, and the leading zeroes are dropped: you cannot use $(( n2 + 0 )) because you'd get an "invalid octal" error for n2 == 008. The $ is optional inside an arithmetic expression, unless you use the base# notation

Ubuntu – Use metaflac to rename .flac files from flac tags recursively

If you put your code into its own file, make it executable, and place in your binary path (e.g. ~/bin).

e.g. rename_flac_tracks_from_meta.sh

You could then use find and xargs to recursively go through your directories and apply your script to each one.

$ cd path/to/flac/folders
$ find . -type d -print0 | xargs -0 -t -I{} sh -c 'cd "{}"  && rename_flac_tracks_from_meta.sh'

Bear in mind that will crawl into directories that might not have flacs in, but it should just hiccup rather than die.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Script to rename files

Ubuntu – Use metaflac to rename .flac files from flac tags recursively

Related Question