Files not available after running find command - find

Question

I tried to rename files ending with ".txt" to ".abc" using the find command as below. Now the files are not available on my disk.
find ./ -type f -iname '*.txt' -exec sh -c 'mv "$0" "$1.abc"' {} \;
can someone explain me the above command in detail what is did with the files.
Is there any possibility to retrive those, if yes how ?

Answer 1

You used the wrong variable and most of the files cannot be retrieved.
find ./ -type f -iname '*.txt' -exec sh -c 'mv "$0" "$1.abc"' {} \;
will rename every .txt file to a file called .abc. So if you files named bar.txt and foo.txt it will rename bar.txt to .abc and then rename foo.txt to .abc which will overwrite the original contents of bar.txt. You cannot see the file because it is .abc and is hidden under a normal list. If you run 'ls -a' you will see a file named ".abc" which will have the contents of the last .txt file that was renamed.
I am not sure how to do exactly what you wanted but running
find ./ -type f -iname '*.txt' -exec sh -c 'mv "$0" "$0.abc"' {} \;
will rename each .txt file to a .txt.abc file. So you would have bar.txt.abc and foo.txt.abc

Answer 2

The explanation of rondo is correct.
But what are the solutions for your problem?
If you want to replace the suffix .txt with .abc you can use rename
You will have success, if you use rename and find like this:
find . -type f -iname '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 rename .txt .abc
For all files found by find like x.txt or a/b.txt the appropriate command will execute, e.g.
rename .txt .abc x.txt
rename .txt .abc a/b.txt
so x.txt -> x.abc, and a/b.txt -> a/b.abc
If you only want to add the suffix .abc to all files you can still use mv
find . -type f -iname '*.txt' -print0 | xargs -0 mv {} {}.abc
With xargs for each file the command mv is executed.
BTW: with the find option "-print0" and the xargs option "-0" the commands work also with filenames which includes spaces.