renaming all files in tree

[squakie]

Please excuse an extremely stupid question:

I have a series of files in a series of folders under folder "famhist". In Windows of course things weren't case sensitive, so when it opened "I0042.html" it found "i0042.html" and would open it. I know how to make the rename command work for changing the "i" to "I", but only within a single folder. Is there a way at the command line to use rename recursively down through a folder tree?

[whitesmith]

The question is not stupid. My favorite for stuff like this is the find command, which allows command execution on found files. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Find_%28Unix%29

[squakie]

I was having problems making the find recursive, so I went back and read the information on your link as well as the man page again. I missed the "-maxdepth" option so it wasn't walking the directory tree. I have that working now (thanks!), so I'm going to try to add the exec for rename to change the "i" to and "I".

Wish me luck, and thanks again!

[steeldriver]

Another way is to enable recursive shell globbing


shopt -s globstar

Then for example



$ rename -nv 's/data/\u$&/' **/*.html
tests/sub1/data1.html renamed as tests/sub1/Data1.html
tests/sub1/subsub1/data7.html renamed as tests/sub1/subsub1/Data7.html
tests/sub1/subsub2/data7.html renamed as tests/sub1/subsub2/Data7.html
tests/sub1/subsub3/data7.html renamed as tests/sub1/subsub3/Data7.html
tests/sub2/data2.html renamed as tests/sub2/Data2.html
tests/sub3/data3.html renamed as tests/sub3/Data3.html

[squakie]

hummmmm.......ok, if I understand this correctly, I would need to do:

rename -nv 's/data/\u$&/' **/*.html

from my /home/dave/famhist folder?

if the \u$& saying Uppercase the $ (first) character in the name?

P.S. - I already tried my previous find, adding the exec from the wiki for passing the matching filenames to rename via xargs, but I failed miserably and changed every file or folder with "i" in the name to have "I" in the name - "luckily" within my home folder on down. But, I still made a mess. Tried reversing the lower/upper case "i" in the find to reset them - "almost" worked. Thought it might be wise to double-check here before doing anything more ;)

[steeldriver]

Yes \u$& upper-cases the first character of the matched string (\U\& upper-cases the whole thing)

The nice thing about 'rename' is that with the -nv switches you can dry-run the replacement and tweak it to get it right before committing

Are you trying to change ALL html files or just ones with a particular matching name (e.g. beginning with i)?

[squakie]

I was trying to change just files that are in the syntax of "i" followed by a numeric string, with a type of html. Fortunately for me (whew!) I tried this and only had a few other html files that it hit that had an "i" in the name but not as the first character. I was able to manually change those back.

Many, many years ago on an old mainframe editor I would have used s/^i/I/ saying substitute the beginning "i" (the caret being the beginning of line character) with the "I". Is there some sort of similar syntax for the rename?

[Vaphell]

yes, this thing works the same way in rename (rename is based on perl and perl is pretty much a superset of (s)ed capability) but given that you work recursively you get all the files with the path portion in front of the name. Obviously ^ won't point where you would want it to point.

you'd have to do something like this

rename -nv 's:(.+/)i:$1I:'
save everything before i as $1 and reuse it later.

example

$ touch i0001.html
$ rename -nv 's/^i/I/' i0001.html
i0001.html renamed as I0001.html
$ rename -nv 's/^i/I/' ./i0001.html # nothing happens because expression doesn't match
$ rename -nv 's:(.*/)i:$1I:' ./i0001.html
./i0001.html renamed as ./I0001.html
but it's not rock solid

$ mkdir iii
$ touch iii/test.html iii/i0002.html
$ rename -nv 's:(.*/)i:$1I:' ./iii/*.html
./iii/i0002.html renamed as ./iii/I0002.html
./iii/test.html renamed as ./Iii/test.html
this on the other hand is

$ rename -nv 's:(.*/)i([^/]+)$:$1I$2:' ./*html ./iii/*.html
./i0001.html renamed as ./I0001.html
./iii/i0002.html renamed as ./iii/I0002.html

but if you change **/*.html to **/i*.html you can go with the shorter version

rename -nv 's:(.*/)i:$1I:' **/i*.html
as the case that made it fail becomes impossible.