Ubuntu – Rename files and folders in all sub directorys to remove character

directoryrenameuninstall

I have some files and folders that were saved in Linux on an external HDD, some of these files and folders contain the characters "::" I want to remove these characters from all files and folders on the drive as I get problems when trying to view the files in windows.

I have successfully removed them from one folder by using in terminal-

rename 's/:://' *::*.*

when in that single directory but want to do it for all files and folders on the drive, and there are many sub folders.

What can I add to the above command to make it work on all sub folders and files in the sub folders or is there a better command.

Thank you.

Best Answer

You can use the find command to search for files and directories recursively ex.

find path/to/start/dir/ -depth -name '*::*.*' -exec rename 's/:://' {} +

The -depth is important if you are renaming files and directories (otherwise the command may "orphan" some matched files by renaming their containing directories before it has a chance to rename them). If you only wish to rename files, then you can add -type f and drop the -depth.

I recommend running the command first with rename -n to make sure that it is doing the right thing.

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Ubuntu – Copy files from a directory to a sub-directory (excluding the sub-directory itself)

Assuming you are using bash as your interactive shell, you can enable extglob which allows you to specify "all files except these ones".

shopt -s extglob
cd Parent
cp !(Child1) Child1/

Ubuntu – Rename all files in a folder to consecutive numbers

Assuming you want to follow the shell globbing order while sorting files, you can do:

#!/bin/bash
counter=0
for file in *; do 
    [[ -f $file ]] && echo mv -i "$file" $((counter+1)).png && ((counter++))
done

Here looping over all the files in the current directory and renaming sequentially based on order, if you want to deal with only the .png files, use for file in *.png instead. counter variable will keep track of the increments.

This is a dry-run, remove echo to let the actual renaming action take place.

Example:

$ counter=0; for file in *; do [[ -f $file ]] && echo mv -i "$file" $((counter+1)).png && ((counter++)); done
mv -i file.txt 1.png
mv -i foo.sh 2.png
mv -i bar.txt 3.png

Best Answer

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Ubuntu – Copy files from a directory to a sub-directory (excluding the sub-directory itself)

Ubuntu – Rename all files in a folder to consecutive numbers

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