rename is a perl-based command-line tool to rename multiple files.
I have, by accident, created numerous files with names that commence with, or contain, a dash or double dash (- or --). When I try to use rename to get rid of the dashes in, for example, '--the-file-name' using
rename 's/-//g' --the-file-name
rename (understandably) complains that 'the-file-name' is not an allowable option for the rename command.
Is there a way to tell rename that '--the-file-name' is a file name and not an option.
Many commands, including Perl's rename script, support a double-dash to denote the end of a command's options. Hence, to rename --the-file-name to the-file-name:
rename 's/-//g' -- --the-file-name
Perl's Getopt::Long module supports this and is used by rename.
In general, see also: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/11376/what-does-double-dash-mean-also-known-as-bare-double-dash
JRFerguson's answer actually works for many commands, not just rename.
Some alternatives also work for commands that do not recognize --:
Prefix the filename with ./ or the full path to it:
rename 's/-//g' ./--*
or
rename 's/-//g' $PWD/--*
Use find (which will also traverse any subdirectories):
find . -name '-*' -exec rename 's/-//g' '{}' ';'
or
find . -name '-*' -exec rename 's/-//g' '{}' +
Related
I want to grep in multiple sub directories, eg.
find subdir1 subdir2 -type f ( -name *.cc -o -name *.h ) -exec grep -e someString {} +
using emacs interactive rgrep. Is this possible? The rgrep in grep.el says:
but when I get to the "Base directory:" input, I can't figure out how to input more than 1 directory.
Is it possible to input more than 1 directory?
Thank you.
You can pass prefix arguments to rgrep to modify the command.
C-uM-x rgrep will take you through the normal prompts and then let you edit the result, at which point you can simply add the additional directories you wish to search to the initial find command.
C-uC-uM-x rgrep just gives you a bare template to edit immediately.
If all of the files are in sub-directories of a project, you might consider using the emacs projectile module. It handles multi-directory searching quickly and painlessly within a project.
Question: In Git Bash on windows, how would you run the following in a way that it will also search folders with spaces in the name, and execute on files with spaces in the name?
$ find ./ -type f -name '*.png' -exec sh -c 'cwebp -q 75 $1 -o "${1%.png}.webp"' _ {} \;
Context I'm running Git Bash on windows, trying to execute a command on all found .png files to convert them to .webp format. It works for all files without spaces in the path, but it's failing to find files with spaces in the filename or files within folders that have spaces in the folder name.A few considerations:
I have many, many levels of folders to iterate through, and I can't run this command separately for each. I really need the recursion to work.I cannot change the folder names; it will break other dependencies (nor did I create the folder or filenames originally, so cut me some slack!)I arrived here by following the suggestions from this article: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/07/converting-images-to-webp/the program, to my knowledge, doesn't ship with any built-in recursive command... golly that'd be handy
Any help you can provide will be appreciated. Thanks!
I have a large file folder structure with many levels (without a pattern in naming convention). How do I run the following command to extract the data from all the folders? the command is:
perl -wne'while(/[\w\.\-]+#[\w\.\-]+\w+/g){print "$&\n"}'inputfile.txt > outputfile.txt
It works for one input file, but want it to go through all the text files in folders and subfolders.
I'd use find to call Perl with the "-i" option for in-place editing. With the "-i" option, you can optionally specify an extension for the saved unmodified file; without it, it modifies the file in-place without saving the unmodified file.
find dirs -name \*.txt -exec perl -i.orig -wne 'while(/[\w\.\-]+#[\w\.\-]+\w+/g){print "$&\n"}' {} \;
or (to start up Perl less often) use:
find dirs -name \*.txt -print | xargs perl -i.orig -wne 'while(/[\w\.\-]+#[\w\.\-]+\w+/g){print "$&\n"}'
Alternatively, you can use the File::Find module to walk the directory tree and then do your own in-place editing, but I think the above method is easier if you are on UNIX/Linux. (If on Windows, you might have to go this way.)
I have been trying to do a recursive grep command on files in sub folders using grep in NTemacs and Cygwin. So far the "best" results have been using grep in eshell. When I use this:
grep "t" -r *
I get a list of all file names containing the letter t, in all sub folders one layer down but notthing else. In Cygwin i get nothing. I'm working on a directroy that is not in the Cygwin install. Don't know if that mather or not.
What I want is to match the content of a more complex string in all files (and not just the file names, but the content). And in all sub directories.
I would like to use eshell from emacs but I'm open to suggestions, apart form using LINUX. This is a work PC and I don't want to do all the setup of a LINUX install.
i just wrote a very similar answer to another question, but i suspect it's the same root problem:
my first thought is that your files have windows line endings (CRLF) as opposed to unix/linux line endings (LF), and that is messing with grep's ability to parse the file. try running this:
dos2unix filename
on each file you need to search then try your grep statement again.
if you need to convert many files across several directories, i suggest using dos2unix with the -exec action of find:
find . -exec dos2unix {} \;
(add whatever other options you need to find before running that, of course)
How do I find and replace every occurrence of:
foo
with
bar
in every text file under the /my/test/dir/ directory tree (recursive find/replace).
BUT I want to be able to do it safely within an SVN checkout and not touch anything inside the .svn directories
Similar to this but now with the SVN restriction: Awk/Sed: How to do a recursive find/replace of a string?
There are several possiblities:
Using find:
Using find to create a list of all files, and then piping them to sed or the equivalent, as suggested in the answer you reference, is fairly straightforward, and only requires scanning through the files once.
You'd use one of the same answers as from the question you referenced, but adding -path '*/.svn' -prune -o after the find . in order to prune out the SVN directories. See this question for a discussion of using the prune option with find -- although note that they've got the pattern wrong. Thus, to print out all the files, you would use:
find . -path '*/.svn' -prune -o -type f -print
Then, you can pipe that into an xargs call or whatever to do the individual replacements, as suggested in the question you referenced. There is a lot of discussion there about different options, which I won't reproduce here, although I prefer the version from John Zwinck's answer:
find . -path '*/.svn' -prune -o -type f -exec sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' {} +
Using recursive grep:
If you have a system with GNU grep, you can use that to find the list of files as well. This is probably less efficient than find, but it does allow you to only call sed on the files that match, and I personally find the syntax a lot easier to remember (or figure out from manpages):
sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' `grep -l -R --exclude-dir='*/.svn' 'foo' .`
The -l option causes grep to only output the list of file names, rather than the matching lines.
Using a GUI editor:
Alternately, if you're using windows, do what I do -- get a copy of the NoteTab editor (available in a free version), and use its search-and-replace-on-disk command, which ignores hidden .svn directories automatically and just works.
Edit: Corrected find pattern to */.svn instead of .svn, added more details and some other possibilities. However, this depends on your platform and svn version: .svn without */ may be required in some cases, like on CentOS 7.
How about this?
grep -i "search_string" `find "*.some_extension"`
That is halfway solution to finding a search_string within files that have a specific extension....once you know the files that has the string, can be easily modified by piping it into sed....