Ubuntu – Remove Leading or Trailing Space(s) in File or Folder Names

bashdirectoryfilesrename

I worked out a neat way ro get rid of duplicate files. You know, the ones that contain "(1).", "(2).", "(3).", etc. in their names. In a terminal window, at the command line, you type in "rm "[backslash]").", but without the quotes. That will do it. The [backslash] "\" means the next character is accepted as just a character, not part of a pair of parentheses. This works when nothing else will. Incidently, I tried to type the "\" into the "rm" command, but it failed to display properly, so I put the term [backslash] there instead.

The appearance of "\ " in a folder or a filename shows the presence of a space there as well. The use of spaces in names is not all that common, unless you work with Windows. Windows just has you bracket the "whole path\file name" in double quotes. You can do that in Ubuntu as well, or just stick a backslash "\" in front of the space. But what if you want to replace the space with a different character instead? Like a hyphen or underscore? How would you do that for all folders and files at once?

Or what if you decide to just remove the spaces, just pack the rest of the characters together? How would you do that?

And here is a toughy: Just get rid or any leading or trailing spaces. even if there is more than one present.

And to wrap it up, how to detect and delete and files that are completely empty. Or folders that are empty.

Best Answer

To remove any number of leading spaces from file names you can use rename (prename) :
```
rename -n 's/^ *//' *
```
To remove any number of trailing spaces from file names you can use rename (prename) :
```
rename -n 's/ *$//' *
```
Remove -n (dry-run) if you are satisfied with the file names.
To remove files or folders that are empty (recursively) :
```
find . -empty
```
Satisfied ? Let the action take place :
```
find . -empty -delete
```
Only in the current directory :
```
find . -maxdepth 1 -empty -delete
```
Also use -type f for only files and -type d for only directories if you want.

Read man rename and man find to get more idea.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Will this ‘find and delete’ command work with the asterisk even with quotes

You need to reformat your command a bit for it to work.

Try this:

find "/home/user/videos folder" -name "*.avi" -mtime +7 -exec rm -f {} \;

Or, in GNU find, to achieve the same thing without -exec:

find "/home/user/videos folder" -name "*.avi" -mtime +7 -delete

The first argument to find is the folder to look in - you shouldn't try and put your entire filter in here, just the starting point. Then use -name to tell it what pattern to look for. You can try this without the -exec or -delete first until you are satisified, then you won't do any damage by trying it.

Enclosing an argument in quotes basically stops the shell from messing with it. If you use -name *.avi, then the argument that find will see could be anything, because the shell will parse it (and replace it with the contents of the current directory that end in .avi) before calling find. This is usually bad and will lead to unexpected results. find knows how to parse * itself.

Ubuntu – Bash Script: Batch file rename to remove/change all characters illegal under a windows filesystem

Create a script rename1.sh:

#! /bin/bash
old=$1
new=${old//[\''"?*%#^!@$&()=+[]{};,`~']}
new=${new//['<>:\|']/-}                   # I removed /, see below.
if [[ -e $new ]] ; then
    if [[ $old != $new ]] ; then
        echo Cannot rename "$old" to "$new" - target already exists.
    fi
else
    mv "$old" "$new"
fi

It renames one file according to the given rules using parameter expansion. To rename a subtree, run it with find:

find /path -exec rename1.sh {} \;

Are you sure you want to replace / with -? It would put all the files into the same directory.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Will this ‘find and delete’ command work with the asterisk even with quotes

Ubuntu – Bash Script: Batch file rename to remove/change all characters illegal under a windows filesystem

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