Ubuntu – Rename files to be capitalised but not impact on file extensions

batch-renamecommand linerename

I am using this on a customer's directory to rename files with first letter of each word being capitalised as per their request:

rename 's/\b(\w)/\u$1/g' *

That works fine, but it also capitalises the first letter of the extension, so I use this to fix that:

rename 's/\.Txt$/.txt/' *.Txt

which works okay if most of the files in a folder are the same extension (generally true),but is a pain if they are very mixed.

To get around that issue, I created a small script that looks like this (don't laugh!):

#!/bin/bash
rename 's/\.Txt$/.txt/' *.Txt
rename 's/\.Doc$/.doc/' *.Doc
rename 's/\.Docx$/.docx/' *.Docx
...
rename 's/\.Xlsx$/.xlsx/' *.Xlsx

I ignore the 'Can't rename *.Txt *.txt: No such file or directory' errors, and if I find an extension that is missing, I just add that line to my script.

I don't think this will matter, but the files are on a Windows server fileshare, but I am accessing it using Ubuntu 16.04LTS. If it does matter, then I could copy them to my local drive first, run a command in Ubuntu, then move the files back if required.

Is there any way to amend the first rename command to ignore the extensions and leave them as lowercase? Can I run the new command in a higher level directory, and have it recurse through all the sub-directories?

Best Answer

One way to achieve this might be to use Negative Lookbehind to only match the word-boundary - word character sequence when it is not preceded by a literal period e.g. given

$ ls
alan's file.txt  bar.txt  foo

then

$ rename -n 's/(?<!\.)\b\w*/\u$&/g' *
rename(alan's file.txt, Alan'S File.txt)
rename(bar.txt, Bar.txt)
rename(foo, Foo)

Assuming you also want to avoid capitalizing the pluralizing s as well, we might modify that to

$ rename -n 's/(?<![.'\''])\b\w*/\u$&/g' *
rename(alan's file.txt, Alan's File.txt)
rename(bar.txt, Bar.txt)
rename(foo, Foo)

or even

$ rename -n 's/(?<![[:punct:]])\b\w*/\u$&/g' *
rename(alan's file.txt, Alan's File.txt)
rename(bar.txt, Bar.txt)
rename(foo, Foo)

Related Solutions

Batch Rename – How to Batch Rename Files to Lowercase

For each file a_file in current directory rename a_file to lower case.

for a_file in *;do mv -v "$a_file" `echo "$a_file" | tr [:upper:] [:lower:]` ;done;

For upper case reverse the arguments to [:lower:] [:upper:]

tr command reference link

Update

For even more control * can be replaced with ls.

For example in a directory containing 1.txt, 2.txt, 3.txt, 1.jpg, 2.jpg and 3.jpg in order to filter only *.jpg files, ls can be used:

for a_file in $(ls *.jpg);do mv -v $a_file `echo $a_file | tr [:upper:] [:lower:]` ;done;

The above code will assign to a_file variable all files with .jpg extension.

Update added -v option to mv command as per sds suggested.

Ubuntu – How to rename a certain prefix in multiple files

You can use the following command:

find -name "*-old-*" -exec rename 's/-old-/-new-/' {} \;

This searches for files containing -old- recursively beginning in your current directory and renames them by replacing the -old- with -new-.

Note: replacing old may be enough, but I included the - in case, there is a second old in the name (like my-old-Folders.doc).

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Batch Rename – How to Batch Rename Files to Lowercase

Ubuntu – How to rename a certain prefix in multiple files

Related Question