First of all, this is my first post here and I must specify that I'm a total Linux newb.
We have recently bought a QNAP NAS box for the office, on this box we have a large amount of data which was copied off an old Mac XServe machine. A lot of files and folders originally had forward slashes in the name (HFS+ should never have allowed this in the first place), which when copied to the NAS were all replaced with a colon.
I now want to rename all colons to underscores, and have found the following commands in another thread here: pitfalls in renaming files in bash
However, the flavour of Linux that is on this box does not understand the rename command, so I'm having to use mv instead. I have tried using the code below, but this will only work for the files in the current folder, is there a way I can change this to include all subfolders?
for f in *.*; do mv -- "$f" "${f//:/_}"; done
I have found that I can find al the files and folders in question using the find command as follows
Files:
find . -type f -name "*:*"
Folders:
find . -type d -name "*:*"
I have been able to export a list of the results above by using
find . -type f -name "*:*" > files.txt
I tried using the command below but I'm getting an error message from find saying it doesn't understand the exec switch, so is there a way to pipe this all into one command, or could I somehow use the files I exported previously?
find . -depth -name "*:*" -exec bash -c 'dir=${1%/*} base=${1##*/}; mv "$1" "$dir/${base//:/_}"' _ {} \;
Thank you!
Vincent
So your for loop code works, but only in the current dir. Also, you are able to use find to build a file with all the files with : in the filename.
So, as you've already done all this, I would just loop over each line of your file, and perform the same mv command.
Something like this:
for f in `cat files.txt`; do mv $f "${f//:/_}"; done
EDIT:
As pointed out by tripleee, using a while loop is a better solution
EG
while read -r f; do mv "$f" "${f//:/_}"; done <files.txt
Hope this helps.
Will
Related
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.)
Could you please help me with find syntax. I'm trying to replicate the effect of this command, which opens all files in each of the specified subdirectories:
open mockups/dashboard/* mockups/widget/singleproduct/* mockups/widget/carousel/*
I'd like to make it work for any set of subdirectories below mockups.
I can show all subdirectories with:
find mockups -type d -print
But I'm not sure how to use xargs to add in the "*". Also, I don't want to separately execute open for each file with "-exec open {} \;", because that launches 50 different copies of Preview, when what I need is one instance of Preview with the 50 files loaded into it.
Thanks!
The version of find I have at hand allows to specify a + sign after the -exec argument:
From the man page:
-exec command {} +
This variant of the -exec action runs the specified command on the
selected files, but the command line is built by appending each
selected file name at the end; the total number of invocations of
the command will be much less than the number of matched files.
The command line is built in much the same way that xargs builds
its command lines. Only one instance of `{}' is allowed within
the command. The command is executed in the starting directory.
That means that as few instances of open will be executed as possible, e.g.:
find mockups -type f -exec open {} +
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....
I am back with a second no-brainer question, but I would like to get this straight in my head.
I have an assignment in which I am charged with providing a command to find a file named test in my home directory (one command using find, and one using grep). I understand that using find is just 'find ~/test', but using grep, wouldn't I have to search out a pattern within the file 'test'? Or is there a way to search for the file (using grep), even if the file is empty?
ls ~ | grep test
I understand that using find is just 'find ~/test'
No. find ~/test will also have a match for every file or directory under the directory $HOME/test/. Rather use find ~ -type f -name test.
The assignment sounds unclear. But yes, if you give any filenames to grep, it will look at the contents of the files and ignore the names of the files. Perhaps you can grep the output of another command? Maybe ls as #Reese suggested, or maybe a different find command.
ls -R ~ | grep test
Explanation: ls -R ~ will recursively list all files and directories in your home folder. grep test will narrow down that list to files (and directories) that have "test" in their name.