Replace text in folder names

Question

How can I replace the same text in folder names in linux?

Say I have "Photos_Jun", "Photos_July", "Photos_Aug", etc. whats the simplest way I can rename them like "Photos Jun", "Photos July", etc (basically I want to replace the underscore with a space " ". I have about 200 of these folders.

I was looking at solution: How can I easily bulk rename files with Perl?

It looks like what im looking for however, I dont know how to make a regular expression to match folders that are alphanumeric followed by a "_".

All files have non-numeric names, so I think [a-zA-Z] is the right way to start.

perl -e 'foreach $f (glob("File\\ Name*")) { $nf = $f; $nf =~ s/(\d+)$/sprintf("%03d",$1)/e; print `mv \"$f\" \"$nf\"`;}'

Thanks for any help!

Thanks everyone who answered, the non-perl solution worked best for me. I had a few dashes to remove, and it worked well for that as well when I replaced the _ with -. — dannyb, Apr 19 '10 at 02:07

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 19 '10 at 01:59

3

Linux has a rename command:

rename '-' ' ' Photos_*

answered Apr 19 '10 at 01:59

Paul Richter

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ghostdog74 · Accepted Answer · 2010-04-19T02:06:44.273

2

if you are on *nix and you don't mind a non Perl solution, here's a shell (bash) solution. remove the echo when satisfied.

#!/bin/bash
shopt -s extglob
for file in +([a-zA-Z])*_+([a-zA-Z])/; do echo mv "$file" "${file//_/ }"; done

edited Apr 19 '10 at 02:06

answered Apr 19 '10 at 01:48

ghostdog74

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small amendment. if you only want folders, put a slash behind. see edit. – ghostdog74 Apr 19 '10 at 02:07

DVK · Answer 3 · 2010-04-19T01:54:20.177

perl -e 'use File::Copy; foreach my $f (glob("*")) { next unless -d $f; my $nf = $f; $nf =~ s/_/ /g; move($f, $nf) || die "Can not move $f to $nf\n"; }

Tu unroll the one-liner:

use strict; # Always do that in Perl. Keeps typoes away.
use File::Copy; # Always use native Perl libraries instead of system calls like `mv`
foreach my $f (glob("*")) {
    next unless -d $f; # Skip non-folders
    next unless $f =~ /^[a-z_ ]+$/i; # Reject names that aren't "a-zA-Z", _ or space
    my $new_f = $f; 
    $new_f =~ s/_/ /g; # Replace underscore with space everywhere in string
    move($f, $nf) || die "Can not move $f to $nf: $!\n";
                     # Always check return value from move, report error
}

Replace text in folder names

3 Answers3