Shell – Using basename to strip file extension and search for files with the same name

filenamesfindshell-script

Basically, I have a folder /test/ that has a number of files of type .doc and .pdf. Some of the files have a .pdf and a .doc version, such as test.doc and test.pdf while others only have one version.

What I'm trying to do is find occurrences where there is a .doc and delete the corresponding .pdf using a script.

I've been tinkering with this line of code:

find /test/ -name "*.doc" - exec basename {} .doc \; -exec rm {}.pdf \;

However this returns the error that it cannot find files named example.doc.pdf instead of deleting the appropriately named .pdf from the find command. The reason I'm trying to do it this way is because there are .pdf files which don't have a matching .doc file which I do not wish to delete.

Best Answer

You can use this find command:

find /test/ -name "*.doc" -exec sh -c 'a="$1"; rm "${a%.doc}.pdf"' find-sh {} \;

It will search for .doc files in the directory /test/. For each found file a shell sh is called with the file as argument. ${a%.doc}.pdf replaces the file extension .doc with .pdf and rm removes it, if the file exists.

Related Solutions

CentOS Files – How to Rename All Files with a Certain Name

rename stringx stringy stringx.*

There are (at least) two utilities called rename on typical Linux systems. Debian and derived distributions (including Ubuntu) ship a Perl script whose syntax would be

rename 's/stringx/stringy/' stringx.*

On other distributions, including CentOS, rename is from util-linux, and its syntax is what I wrote above. This utility is available under the name rename.ul on Debian and derivatives.

If you want to recurse in subdirectories, assuming that by csh you mean tcsh (but really, think of entering the mid-1990s and switching to zsh):

set globstar
rename stringx stringy stringx.* **/stringx.*

Stuck With Using find and sed to Replace String in Filenames

You can use find -exec ... to do the replacement in a one-line shell script.

find . -name "*.mp3" -type f -exec bash -c 'mv "$1" "${1/pronunciation_de_}"' bash {} \;

The filename {} is passed as parameter $1 to the executed bash process and ${1/pronunciation_de_} makes use of bash's parameter expansion capabilities and replaces the first occurrence of pronunciation_de_ in $1 with an empty string.

Additional option -type f makes sure to match only regular files.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

CentOS Files – How to Rename All Files with a Certain Name

Stuck With Using find and sed to Replace String in Filenames

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