Bash – How to Remove Whitespace from All Items in a Directory and Subdirectory

bashfilesrecursiverename

I have a directory which contains files and sub directories, some of which have whitespace in their names. Further more each of these sub directories contains files with whitespace in their names. Is there a simple way to remove the whitespace from all the names in the parent directory and all sub directories at once?

Best Answer

Is there a simple way to remove the whitespace from all the names in the parent directory and all sub directories at once?

Yes there is:

find /tmp/ -depth -name "* *" -execdir rename 's/ /_/g' "{}" \;

Related Solutions

Remove all instances of _000 from multiple files

Although mikesrv solution is much better and safer I think this can be done also with rename:

find Music/ -type f -name '*_000' -print0 | xargs -r0 rename -v '_000' ''

But there are still potential problems as mentioned, for example album_00020_000 will be renamed to album20 which obviously is not the desired behaviour.
I think on debian distribution was a perl tool rename which could do it. But unfortunately I can not find a way how to install it. So I found following perl script here which can suffice:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# rename - Larry's filename fixer
$op = shift or die "Usage: rename expr [files]\n";
chomp(@ARGV = <STDIN>) unless @ARGV;
for (@ARGV) {
    $was = $_;
    eval $op;
    die $@ if $@;
    rename($was,$_) unless $was eq $_;
}

So you can make this script executable and run:

find Music/ -type f -name '*_000' | /path_to_script/rename.pl 's/_000$//'

Shell – Delete all files with executable permission in a directory

You should use find for this task:

find . -type f -executable

will show you the files that are executable by current user, recursively.

To limit the search to current directory only:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -executable

To remove:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -executable -exec rm {} +

Or with GNU find:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -executable -delete

As a side note, if you want to find files executable by any user, not just the current user (set as regular execute permission bits):

find . -type f -perm /111

Best Answer

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Remove all instances of _000 from multiple files

Shell – Delete all files with executable permission in a directory

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