renaming all files with similar structure to same name

Question

I have a lot of files in subsubfolders. They all look like in.*.radiate, where * is just a number.

Is there a way to rename all of them with a single command to just in.radiate?

Either in linux or MATLAB?

Answer 1

If there's an easier way, I do not know, but here's a simple perl script that'll do the job for you:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

my $oldname = '*.radiate';   # Pattern of old filename. Edit if desired.
my $newname = 'in.radiate';  # New filename. Edit if desired.

foreach my $folder1 (glob("*"))
{
    if (-d $folder1)
    {
        foreach my $folder2 (glob("$folder1/*"))
        {
            if (-d "$folder2")
            {
                print "Processing $folder2\n";
                system("mv $folder2/$oldname $folder2/$newname");
            }
        }
    }
}

Stick that into a file named, for example, rename.pl in the directory where all of the subdirectories are, and run it with perl rename.pl.

It has a bug/feature where it'll let you know if the folder being processesed doesn't contain a .radiate file.

There are probably many shorter ways to do it, but this should be readable enough for "anyone" to edit if needed.

EDIT: Updated to traverse subdirectories of subdirectories, as I misread the original question. Tested it on my machine, and it works as intended on Linux Mint 17 with perl 5.18.2