Bash – How to rename files with sed and csv

bashcsvrenamesedshell

I'm new with Linux, sed, and awk but I don't mind challenging myself on new ideas. That being said, I understand the purpose and how to use rename and sed for a common event such as adding a $date or removing a _1234 from all the files. However, I want to figure out how to rename 100's of files that have no relation to one another other than the file type.

Renaming example:

  • old name alpha.ai renamed to omega.ai
  • old name pie32.ai renamed to apple.ai
  • old name xmas.ai renamed to santa.ai

I originally used a bash script to pull all the names to a .csv file and placed them in column A. In column B I wrote in the new names. Now since there is not a common event occurring how could you write sed or the like to do this??

#!/bin/bash
for i in *.ai
do
        mv $i $(echo $i | sed "a1,b1")

done

Best Answer

If you happen to have a file that looks like this:

old_name1, new_name1
old_name2, new_name2
old_name3, new_name3

You can do a dirty little trick:

sed 's/^/mv -vi "/;s/, /" "/;s/$/";/' < names.csv | bash -

The sed comamnds (delimited by semicolons) does this (s is for substitute, / is used as a delimiter, any other character would do, @ is often used as well):

  • s/^/mv -vi "/ - adds mv -vi " at the beginning of each line (^ is beginning of line);
  • s/, /" "/ - replaces comma followed by a space with " ";
  • s/$/";/ - appends double quotes to all lines ($ means end of line)

and hence the output of sed will be this:

mv -vi "old_name1" "new_name1"
mv -vi "old_name2" "new_name2"
mv -vi "old_name3" "new_name3"

which will be fed to bash to execute. The quotes around filenames are not mandatory, they just guard any possible spaces in the filenames (however they will defintely not help against spaces followed by a comma, since that is used as delimiter). the -v instructs mv to display what it is doing (in case something goes wrong, you'll know what happened), -i will cause it to ask if it were to overwrite already existing file.

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