Scripting – How to Remove Newlines in File Names

filesrenamescripting

I have a PHP code that generates the file name on which wget will append its logs. I generated 2000+ files, but the problem is I am having trouble working with them because I had a mistake of putting PHP_EOL as part of its name, that code will add
LF/line feed/%0A at its name

Example of such file name (when accessed via browser, when put on /var/www/html) http://xxxx/wget_01_a%0a.txt notice the %0a before the extension name

I messed up, and I wish there's a rename batch that will search through all files and if it found line feed it would rename it without the line feed so it would just be http://xxxx/wget_01_a.txt

I am not pretty sure how to handle this because seems like when I ls on putty all special character not limited to that unwanted char becomes ?, what I only wish to target is that line feed.

Best Answer

Using the utility rename from util-linux, which CentOS 6 provides, and assuming bash:

rename $'\n' '' wget_*

This asks to delete newline characters from the names of listed files. I recommend trying it out on a small subset to ensure it does what you want it to (note that rename on CentOS 7 supports a -v switch to show you what changes it is making).

If instead you were on a distribution that provides the Perl-based rename:

rename -n 's/\n//g' wget_*

And then run without -n to actually perform the renaming.

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Remove characters from file names recursively

Meet the Perl rename tool:

$ rename -n -v  's/~[^.]+//' *~*
rename(ABCDEF~20160531-162719, ABCDEF)
rename(Letter to Client 27May2016~20160531-162719.pdf, Letter to Client 27May2016.pdf)

(online man page, also see this Q)

That regex says to match a tilde, as many characters that are not dots, but at least one; and to replace whatever matched with an empty string. Remove the -n to actually do the replace. We could change the pattern to ~[-0-9]+ to just replace digits and dashes.

Sorry, you said "recursively", so lets use find:

$ find -type f -name "*~*" -execdir  rename -n -v  's/~[-0-9]+//' {} +
rename(./ABCDEF~20160531-162719, ./ABCDEF)
rename(./Letter to Client 27May2016~20160531-162719.pdf, ./Letter to Client 27May2016.pdf)

Or just with Bash or ksh, though directories with ~ followed by digits will break this:

$ shopt -s extglob       # not needed in ksh (as far as I can tell)
$ shopt -s globstar      # 'set -o globstar' in ksh
$ for f in **/*~* ; do 
    g=${f//~+([-0-9])/}; 
    echo mv -- "$f" "$g" 
  done
mv -- ABCDEF~20160531-162719 ABCDEF
mv -- Letter to Client 27May2016~20160531-162719.pdf Letter to Client 27May2016.pdf

Again, remove the echo to actually do the rename.

Best Answer

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Remove characters from file names recursively

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