find -execdir rename
https://superuser.com/a/213146/128124 works directly only for suffixes, but this will work for arbitrary regex replacements on basenames:
PATH=/usr/bin find . -depth -execdir rename 's/_dbg.txt$/_.txt' '{}' \;
or to affect files only:
PATH=/usr/bin find . -type f -execdir rename 's/_dbg.txt$/_.txt' '{}' \;
-execdir
first cd
s into the directory before executing only on the basename.
Tested on Ubuntu 20.04, find 4.7.0, rename 1.10.
Convenient and safer helper for it
find-rename-regex() (
set -eu
find_and_replace="$1"
PATH="$(echo "$PATH" | sed -E 's/(^|:)[^\/][^:]*//g')" \
find . -depth -execdir rename "${2:--n}" "s/${find_and_replace}" '{}' \;
)
GitHub upstream.
Sample usage to replace spaces ' ' with hyphens '-'.
Dry run that shows what would be renamed to what without actually doing it:
find-rename-regex ' /-/g'
Do the replace:
find-rename-regex ' /-/g' -v
Command explanation
The awesome -execdir
option does a cd
into the directory before executing the rename
command, unlike -exec
.
-depth
ensure that the renaming happens first on children, and then on parents, to prevent potential problems with missing parent directories.
-execdir
is required because rename does not play well with non-basename input paths, e.g. the following fails:
rename 's/findme/replaceme/g' acc/acc
The PATH
hacking is required because -execdir
has one very annoying drawback: find
is extremely opinionated and refuses to do anything with -execdir
if you have any relative paths in your PATH
environment variable, e.g. ./node_modules/.bin
, failing with:
find: The relative path ‘./node_modules/.bin’ is included in the PATH environment variable, which is insecure in combination with the -execdir action of find. Please remove that entry from $PATH
See also: https://askubuntu.com/questions/621132/why-using-the-execdir-action-is-insecure-for-directory-which-is-in-the-path/1109378#1109378
-execdir
is a GNU find extension to POSIX. rename
is Perl based and comes from the rename
package.
Rename lookahead workaround
If your input paths don't come from find
, or if you've had enough of the relative path annoyance, we can use some Perl lookahead to safely rename directories as in:
git ls-files | sort -r | xargs rename 's/findme(?!.*\/)\/?$/replaceme/g' '{}'
I haven't found a convenient analogue for -execdir
with xargs
: Xargs: change working directory to file path before executing?
The sort -r
is required to ensure that files come after their respective directories, since longer paths come after shorter ones with the same prefix.
Tested in Ubuntu 18.10.
rename
or Red Hatrename
?