Using find command to add common suffix to all files.

[Danny Fang]

Hi,

I'm attempting to use the find command to list all files within a directory, add a ".txt" extension to their existing filenames.

However, I got only a single file, and in another instance an error msg indicating that the files are similar. See output below.
bash-2.05$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 danny nwwls 0 Oct 7 19:15 f1
-rw-r--r-- 1 danny nwwls 0 Oct 7 19:15 f2
-rw-r--r-- 1 danny nwwls 0 Oct 7 19:15 f3
-rw-r--r-- 1 danny nwwls 0 Oct 7 19:15 f4
-rw-r--r-- 1 danny nwwls 0 Oct 7 19:15 f5
bash-2.05$ find . -type f -name "f*" -exec mv {} "{}.txt" \;
bash-2.05$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 danny nwwls 0 Oct 7 19:15 {}.txt
bash-2.05$

bash-2.05$ find . -type f -name "f*" -exec mv {} "f*.txt" \;
mv: ./f*.txt and f*.txt are identical
bash-2.05$


I had to use these in the bash or perl scripts:
for i in `ls `
do
mv $i $i.txt
done

OR:
#!/usr/bin/perl
#
use strict;
use File::Copy;

while (<@ARGV>) {
my $ori = $_;
rename($ori, "$ori\.txt");
}

Could anyone show me how can I achieve the same as I did using the scripts, on a command line?

Thanks
Danny

[Steven Schweda]

> [...] -exec mv {} "{}.txt" \;

Don't quote the "{}.txt"? It makes sense to
quote a file name in a script, because the
name could include a space or other special
character, but if "find -exec" can't deal
with an unquoted
{}.txt
then there's probably no hope for a plain
{}
either, and you're using that already.

> mv $i $i.txt

And in this script you quote nothing, so why
annoy the "find" command with quotation?

[Danny Fang]

HI Steven,

I've tried unquoting the {}.txt as you've suggested. However, that did not work as it produced the same result as before:

bash-2.05$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 danny nwwls 0 Oct 7 23:50 f1
-rw-r--r-- 1 danny nwwls 0 Oct 7 23:50 f2
-rw-r--r-- 1 danny nwwls 0 Oct 7 23:50 f3
bash-2.05$ find . -type f -name "f*" -exec mv {} {}.txt \;
bash-2.05$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 danny nwwls 0 Oct 7 23:50 {}.txt
bash-2.05$

Appreciate it if you could point to me where did I go wrong in this.

Thanks
Danny

[Ivan Ferreira · Accepted solution]

Maybe you could do something like:

for FILE in $(find . -type f -name "f*" )
do
mv ${FILE} ${FILE}.txt
done

[Steven Schweda]

Oops. "find" replaces "{}" only when it sees
it as a "command argument", that is, as an
isolated token. "find" has enough
limitations that I don't see a good way to
avoid using a script (in some form or other).

You could write a little script like this:

sol# cat ../append_name.sh
#!/bin/sh
mv "$1" "${2}${3}"

and then use it:

sol# ls -l
total 6
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4 Oct 7 15:51 a
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4 Oct 7 15:51 b
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4 Oct 7 16:11 c c

sol# find . -name '*' -exec ../append_name.sh {} {} '.txt' \;

sol# ls -l
total 6
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4 Oct 7 15:51 a.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4 Oct 7 15:51 b.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4 Oct 7 16:11 c c.txt

On the bright side, "find" does seem to pass
a funny file name (like "c c") as a unit, so
if the script quotes things properly, funny
file names won't (always) cause trouble.

That was done on a Solaris system, but if
you've seen one UNIX, ...

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Danny:

# find /path -type f -print|xargs -i mv {} {}.txt

Regards!

...JRF...