Renaming file which got a quote mark ‘ in its name

quotingrename

I got a little bit of a problem. One client tasked me with the migration of sites from a really old server. Don't know how they got there, but there are files with ' in their names. Is there any way to rename the file? mv doesn't seem to do the trick.

ls shows it as 90843_O\\'ConnorPaul_GeneralManager.jpg

When I try

 mv 90843_O\\'ConnorPaul_GeneralManager.jpg 90843_O_ConnorPaul_GeneralManager.jpg

it does nothing with the > in the new line as if waiting for more input.

If I try

mv 90843_O\'ConnorPaul_GeneralManager.jpg 90843_O_ConnorPaul_GeneralManager.jpg

I get the error

mv: cannot stat '90843_O\'ConnorPaul_GeneralManager.jpg': No such file
or directory

Also, is there simple way to change \' to _in all files in certain folder?

Best Answer

Bash tab completion should be able to do the right thing here if you just type mv 90843_O and press tab. Otherwise, one way to properly escape the name is:

mv "90843_O\\\\'ConnorPaul_GeneralManager.jpg" dest.jpg

The double quotes remove the need to escape the ', but the two backslash characters still need to be escaped (one extra backslash for each makes four backslashes). Another option is:

mv '90843_O\\'\'ConnorPaul_GeneralManager.jpg dest.jpg

Here putting the backslashes in single quotes removes the need to escape them, but you need to end the single quotes to add a literal '. This is escaped after the quotes end.

Note the issue here is as much to do with having backslashes in the name as the single quote. To replace the \\' sequence (since there are two backslashes in the filename in the question, both will cause problems) with an underscore for all files in a directory using a loop:

for file in *"\\\\'"*; do
  mv -i "$file" "${file//"\\\\'"/_}"
done

The -i will make mv prompt if any files will be overwritten. Using prename (rename links to this on many systems):

prename -n 's:\\\\'\'':_:g' *"\\\\'"*

Remove the -n when you are happy it is doing what you want. Note that the backslash characters should be escaped inside the perl expression here, even though there are single quotes around them (without the single quotes you would need eight backslashes since four would be removed by the shell and not be part of the perl expression).

Related Solutions

Remove duplicates by renaming identical fles to same name

This command will rename all files to the md5sum of their content. That means files with the same content will get the same name.

for f in *; do mv $f $(md5sum $f | cut -d " " -f 1); done

You can replace md5sum with sha1sum in the command.

For this demonstration I added -v to mv so we can see what is being renamed.

$ echo 1 > a
$ echo 2 > b
$ echo 1 > c
$ ls -1
a
b
c
$ for f in *; do mv -v $f $(md5sum $f | cut -d " " -f 1); done
`a' -> `b026324c6904b2a9cb4b88d6d61c81d1'
`b' -> `26ab0db90d72e28ad0ba1e22ee510510'
`c' -> `b026324c6904b2a9cb4b88d6d61c81d1'
$ ls -1
26ab0db90d72e28ad0ba1e22ee510510
b026324c6904b2a9cb4b88d6d61c81d1

You can also safely run this command in a directory where some files have unified filename while other have not.

$ echo 1 > d
$ echo 2 > e
$ ls -1
26ab0db90d72e28ad0ba1e22ee510510
b026324c6904b2a9cb4b88d6d61c81d1
d
e
$ for f in *; do mv -v $f $(md5sum $f | cut -d " " -f 1); done
mv: `26ab0db90d72e28ad0ba1e22ee510510' and `26ab0db90d72e28ad0ba1e22ee510510' are the same file
mv: `b026324c6904b2a9cb4b88d6d61c81d1' and `b026324c6904b2a9cb4b88d6d61c81d1' are the same file
`d' -> `b026324c6904b2a9cb4b88d6d61c81d1'
`e' -> `26ab0db90d72e28ad0ba1e22ee510510'
$ ls -1
26ab0db90d72e28ad0ba1e22ee510510
b026324c6904b2a9cb4b88d6d61c81d1

Note that it will still calculate the hash of the files that are already hashed. So if the files are huge you might want to prevent the rehashing.

Shell Script – Fix mv: Cannot Stat No Such File or Directory

mv ${cwd}/${folder}'/data/*' ${cwd}/${folder}

The quotes (') there prevent the shell from doing globbing. The * is being passed literally to the mv command, which fails since it doesn't find files called * in the directories indicated.

Change this to:

mv "${cwd}/${folder}/data"/* "${cwd}/${folder}"

(Double quotes to prevent problems if you ever have a directory name with spaces in it. * outside the quotes.)

You'll still get the errors for the empty directories though. (Same sort of reason: if the file doesn't find a match for the pattern, it passes the pattern itself as an argument to the command.)

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Remove duplicates by renaming identical fles to same name

Shell Script – Fix mv: Cannot Stat No Such File or Directory

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