mv on multiple file with joker

[Leo The Cat]

Hi Guys

Here 400 files like this:

ls *precl*
aa.precl.test
aaprecl.start
precl.bb
rrpreclyy.start
....


I need to rename all this file as this:
aa.prect.test
aaprect.start
prect.bb
rrprectyy.start
...

What is the best way ? Of course the naive command below
mv *prect* *prect*
doesn't work naturally.


Best regards
Den

[Ivan Ferreira · Accepted solution]

You can use:

for FILE in $(ls); do NEWFILE=$(echo $FILE| sed 's/precl/prect/g'); mv $FILE $NEWFILE ; done

[Leo The Cat]

Thank you very much Ivan.
I Don't close this thread immediately in case of some other callback !

Bests Regards
Den

[Leo The Cat]

Ho to use environment variable with sed like this

MYSOURCE=prect
MYDEST=precl
for FILE in $(ls *$MYSOURCE*); do NEWFILE=$(echo $FILE| sed 's/$MYSOURCE/$MYDEST/g'); mv $FILE $NEWFILE ; done

Bests Regards
Den

[Steven Schweda]

> for FILE in $(ls); [...]

Or, if "$(ls)" causes problems, start with
"find", and do something similar.

bash$ ls -l
total 1
-rw-r----- 1 SMS 40 5 Mar 19 08:41 a b
-rw-r----- 1 SMS 40 5 Mar 19 08:41 c d
bash$ for file in $(ls) ; do echo $file ; done
a
b
c
d
bash$


bash$ find . -type f
./a b
./c d


"$(ls)" could also make the command line too
long.

[Leo The Cat]

About Environment variable, this seems do the job:


MYSOURCE=prect
MYDEST=precl
for FILE in $(ls *$MYSOURCE*); do NEWFILE=$(echo $FILE| sed 's/'$MYSOURCE'/'$MYDEST'/g'); mv $FILE $NEWFILE ; done

Any comment ? except the find insteaf of ls command.

Bests Regards
Den

[Ivan Ferreira]

Single quotes in your sed command probably won't expand the environment variables. Use double quote instead.

[Leo The Cat]

This works with single quote ....

[Steven Schweda]

> This works with single quote ....

Because you're quoting only tiny parts of
the command:
's/'
'/'
'/g'

Not much point in that. The hazards are in
the other parts.

[emha_1]

and what about simple:

rename precl prect *


emha.

[Dennis Handly]

>This works with single quote

Yes, you can stutter your quotes like that but it is hard to read. If you can use double quotes, do so.
Of course if you use double quotes and have to use lots of backslashes, that is also hard to read.

[Stephen P. Schaefer]

There's no need to invoke sed. If one can assume that neither prefix nor suffix matches "precl", in a bash shell you can

for i in *precl*; do mv "$i" "${i%%precl*}prect${i##*precl}"; done

Modern bash allows a very long command line length, so that probably won't hit the limit; if you're concerned that it might then you might do

ls | grep precl | while read i; do mv "$i" "${i%%precl*}prect${i##*precl}"; done