I should start off by saying that I am still a beginner in powershell scripting.
I am trying to rename all files recursively in a directory by replacing a "+" with a " " in the file name.
The command I use is: Get-ChildItem -File -Recurse | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.name -replace "+", " "} but doesn't work and gives me the following error:
Instead if I do this: Get-ChildItem -File -Recurse | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.name -replace "a", " "} everything works well.
I think the problem is with the "+" character but can't find anything on the web that tackles this problem. Does anyone know how to represent it or how to solve this?
You must escape the plus sign and the command should work:
Get-ChildItem -File -Recurse | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.name -replace "\+", " "}
Related
I have a large amount of files in a large amount of folders that I want to set to all have the same file extension. Using this works for single file ext
Get-ChildItem -File -Recurse | ForEach-Object { Rename-Item -Path $_.PSPath -NewName $_.Name.replace(".webp",".jpg")}
But using this for multiple files ext does nothing
Get-ChildItem -File -Recurse | ForEach-Object { Rename-Item -Path $_.PSPath -NewName $_.Name.replace(".jpeg.png.webp",".jpg")}
I have tried .* for the file ext to cover all of them and adding spaces between the exts but this does nothing either.
Can someone point out where I am being an idiot?
To avoid renaming parts of the file name that are not the extension, I would advise against using -replace, unless you treat it as it should by escaping the characters that have special meaning for regex (the dot) and by anchoring the string to replace.
Better use a dedicated .Net function:
(Get-ChildItem -Filter '*.jpeg','*.png','*.webp' -File -Recurse) | Rename-Item -NewName {[System.IO.Path]::ChangeExtension($_.Name, ".jpg")}
or if you do want to use -replace:
(Get-ChildItem -Filter '*.jpeg','*.png','*.webp' -File -Recurse) | Rename-Item -NewName { $_.Name -replace '\.(jpeg|png|webp)$', '.jpg' }
Also, by specifying the extensions in the -Filter parameter of Get-ChildItem, you do not iterate all files, eventhough they can have extensions you do not want to rename, plus Get-ChidItem will do its job faster.
You can use | for OR operations.
Get-ChildItem -File -Recurse | Rename-Item -NewName { $_.Name -replace "\.jpeg$|\.png$|\.webp$",".jpg" }
the \. is needed to match a literal ., and the $ is needed to tell the command to only match those three strings when they occur at the end of the filename.
I tried the code found here without success.
What I need is to replace an exact text with another, but this code doesn't seem to deal with exact text.
This is the code I used, and what I need is, for example, for a file name that ends with ".L.wav" to be replaced with "_L.wav", but what happens is that powershell tries to rename even the file that ends with ".BL.wav" into "_L.wav".
Thank you.
ls *.* | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.name -replace ".L.wav","_L.wav"}
ls *.* | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.name -replace ".LFE.wav","_LFE.wav"}
ls *.* | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.name -replace ".R.wav","_R.wav"}
ls *.* | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.name -replace ".BL.wav","_LSR.wav"}
ls *.* | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.name -replace ".BR.wav","_RSR.wav"}
ls *.* | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.name -replace ".SL.wav","_LSS.wav"}
ls *.* | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.name -replace ".SR.wav","_RSS.wav"}
Read-Host -Prompt "Press Enter to exit" ```
The dot in regex means Any Character. Without escaping that, things go wrong.
Try
Rename-Item -NewName {$_.Name -replace ('{0}$' -f [regex]::Escape('.L.wav')),'_L.wav'}
or manually escape the regex metacharacters:
Rename-Item -NewName {$_.Name -replace '\.L\.wav$','_L.wav'}
The $ at the end anchors the text to match at the end on the string
Also, instead of doing ls *.* | Rename-Item {...}, better use
(Get-ChildItem -Filter '*.L.wav' -File) | Rename-Item {...}
(ls is alias to Get-ChildItem )
Using the -Filter you can specify what files you're looking for.
Using the -File switch, you make sure you do not also try to rename folder objects.
By surrounding the Get-ChildItem part of the code in brackets, you make sure the gathering of the files is complete before you start renaming them. Otherwise, chances are the code will try and keep renaming files that are already processed.
Long story short: need to change multiple file extensions that are . (in Windows, the file extension is just a .) to .csv. I am able to do this in command prompt with this:
ren *. *.csv
But when I try to rename in Powershell, it only changes the first file (result: .csv.csv.csv.csv.csv.csv.csv) while the rest of the files remain untouched. I used this command:
Dir | Rename-Item -NewName { $_.name -replace ".",".csv" }
Can someone explain what I'm doing wrong and how come the first file is being renamed as such? Don't understand why Powershell makes it more complicated since it is based off CMD.
-replace is using regular expression matching where . will match any character so every character is replaced with .csv. Try this to replace *.txt and *.file with *.csv
gci -File | Rename-Item -NewName { $_.name -replace "\.(txt|file)$", ".csv" }
The question has changed. If your files really end in . which I can't actually reproduce then -replace "\.$", ".csv" where \. matches a literal dot and $ matches the end of the line.
If your files have no extension at all then you could do -replace "$", ".csv"
Or you could filter for files with no extension and just add one
gci -File |? Extension -eq '' |% { Rename-Item $_.FullName -NewName "$($_).csv" }
Get-ChildItem -Path C:\ -File | ForEach {Rename-Item $_.FullName -NewName ($_.name).Replace(".txt",".csv")}
Using dot notation, it reads characters as such; meaning no need in escaping any special chars.
I've been using the below to replace spaces in all the filenames and folders under the current directory location with underscores.
dir -Force -Recurse | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.name -replace " ","_"}
How do I specify to only replace spaces if they are at the the beginning of the filename, eg the first character?
Get-ChildItem -Force -Recurse | Rename-Item -NewName ($_.Name -replace "^ ","_")
Your post title doesn't quite line up with what you're asking.
There's also a syntax error in your example code (you're missing the period when trying to access the Name property of the PSItem $_).
None the less I hope this is what you're looking for. You were mostly there. The first parameter of -replace interprets regex.
I have the following code:
Get-ChildItem . *. | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.Name -replace 'line21','line21.map52'}
producing this error:
file: line21 is currently of type File (No extension).
When trying to change it to another extension it does not change.
However for the same scenario, it works perfectly fine if I took another file:
Get-ChildItem . *. | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.Name -replace 'line22.txt','line22.map52'}
This behavior is happening, because your Get-ChildItem command is only retrieving files/folders whose names match *.. The file name "line21" does not match *. so it is being excluded.
Change your command to this:
Get-ChildItem -Path . -Include * | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.Name -replace 'line21','line21.map52'};