Bash Script Renaming Files
I recently needed to rename a bunch of files. I didn’t want to do it manually because it would take too long and I don’t like copying+pasting that many times. This is where shell-scripting comes in handy.
Lets take this example (its not exactly what I was doing but will work for this context.) I wanted the type to show up last in the following example:
ls -1 Cola - Amazing Things to do with cola.txt Beer - Brewing your own Microbrews.txt Wine - The connoisseurs guide.txt |
To look like:
Amazing Things to do with cola - Cola.txt |
To Achieve this the following can be done:
ls -1 | while read i; do mv "$i" "`echo $i | cut -d - -f 2 |cut -c 2- | sed 's/\.txt//'` - `echo $i | cut -d - -f 1`"; done; |
This will give the order I want but without the .txt on the end. The next thing to do is to append the .txt.
For some odd reason there was a space on the end so I compensated by using “$i “. The following adds .txt to the end of each file:
find . | while read i; do mv "$i " "$i.txt"; done; |
For more examples on how to use the commands used in this post refer to the man pages and related posts.
