Remove space before filename and folders recursively

Question

I'm currently moving content from an old xServe to a Synology NAS and the client decided 10 years ago to add one or more spaces before filenames and folders to make them appear higher up in the tree. When moving everything to the Synology NAS we're getting a lot of errors because of this.

The ideal solution for me would be to have a script that removes only the space(s) before the name and keeps the rest.

I found another similar thread here but that removes any space regardless of where it is found in the name. The script from the other thread is

find /tmp/ -depth -name "* *" -execdir rename 's/ /_/g' "{}" \;

Does anyone have an idea?

Thank you!

Can we assume that there are no file names that differ *only* in leading spaces, e.g., ' file.txt vs 'file.txt'? — chepner, Oct 19 '16 at 14:51
Add a beginning marker in the *search* : `s/^ /...` ? and remove the global substitution e.g. g in `/g`. — Jean-Baptiste Yunès, Oct 19 '16 at 15:33

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 19 '16 at 19:28

1

This should do what you are asking.

for oldname in /path/to/directory/* 
do
    newname="$(echo $oldname | sed 's/^ //')"
    #echo 'mv' "${oldname}" "${newname/ /}" ## Uncomment this line to test 
    mv "${oldname}" "${newname/ /}"
done

answered Oct 19 '16 at 19:28

I0_ol

1,054
1
14
28

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:18

1

Thank you for helping out. With the help of Jean-Baptiste Yunès I managed to get this command that works perfectly. Thanks for all your help!

find /your-folder/ -depth -name "* *" -execdir rename 's/^ *//' "{}" \;

edited May 23 '17 at 12:18

Community

1
1

answered Oct 20 '16 at 12:34

Marcus Brunström

65
6

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 20 '16 at 12:48

Something like that should do the trick:

for i in "/path/to/directory with spaces/"* ; do
    dirname="$(dirname "$i")" # replace with the hardcoded path if you want
    newname="$(echo "$i" | sed "s|$dirname/ \+|$dirname/|")"
    # redirect to /dev/null if there are collisions or files without leading spaces
    mv "$i" "$newname" 2>/dev/null
done

You could write it as oneliner, but then it looks somehow messy with ". I suggest wrapping into a script with replacing the directory with $1.

Remove space before filename and folders recursively

3 Answers3