How to rename all files and directories in current folder?

Question

I have a directory structure like this:

./
  whatever/
    foos_whatever.ext
  something/
    foo/
      1.ext
      2.ext
  another/
    foo.ext

I want to rename all files and directories that contain foo. I would like to replace foo with bar.

Here is what I am trying:

[naomi ~/app]$ find . -name '*foo*' -exec f={} && mv -v f ${f/foo/bar} \;

This is the error I am receiving:

find: -exec: no terminating ";" or "+"

Thanks for any help :D

Answer 1

The obvious way I think yould be this :

find -name "*foo*" -exec rename s/foo/bar/ {} \;

or with xargs, if you have a lot of files to rename :

find -name "*foo*" | xargs -I '{}' rename s/foo/bar/ '{}'

However, the problem with that, is if you have a directory structure that looks something like this :

.
|-- fooDir
|   |-- foo.txt
|   `-- abc
`-- foo2

It will fail at renaming foo.txt, because it will first rename fooDir into barDir, and then claim it no longer finds "fooDir/foo.txt"

Simply re-running the command until you have no error works but it's sloppy. Another way would be to run the command in a loop, once for each level of depth of your directory tree, with the find options -mindepth and -maxdepth set to exclude other levels, but then you have to know the depth of your directory system.

I can't think of a better way.

Answer 2

You can't use command chains like that in -exec, since the shell interprets them as being continuations of find itself. Either run the chain in a subshell, or use rename or prename to rename the file instead.