Rename files and directories recursively under ubuntu /bash

Question

I want to rename all files and directories that contain the word \"special\" to \"regular\". It should maintain case sensitivity so \"Special\" won\'t become \"regular\".

Answer 1

@speakr's answer was the clue for me.

If using -execdir to transform both files and directories, you'll also want to remove -type f from the example shown. To spell it out, use:

find /your/target/path/ -execdir rename 's/special/regular/' '{}' \+

Also, consider adding g (global) flag to the regex if you want to replace all occurrences of special with regular in a given filename and not just the first occurrence. For example:

find /your/target/path/ -execdir rename 's/special/regular/g' '{}' \+

will transform special-special.jpg to regular-regular.jpg. Without the global flag, you'll end up with regular-special.jpg.

FYI: GNU Rename is not installed by default on Mac OSX. If you are using the Homebrew package manager, brew install rename will remedy this.

Answer 2

A solution using find:

To rename files only:

find /your/target/path/ -type f -exec rename 's/special/regular/' '{}' \;

To rename directories only:

find /your/target/path/ -type d -execdir rename 's/special/regular/' '{}' \+

To rename both files and directories:

find /your/target/path/ -execdir rename 's/special/regular/' '{}' \+

Answer 3

As mentioned by Rui Seixas Monteiro it's best to use the -iregex pattern option with the Find command. I've found the following works and includes the global flag in the regex as mentioned by U007D:

Files:

find /path/ -type f -iregex '.*special.*' -execdir rename 's/special/regular/g' '{}' \+;

Directories:

find /path/ -type d -iregex '.*special.*' -execdir rename 's/special/regular/g' '{}' \+;

Files and Directories

find /path/ -iregex '.*special.*' -execdir rename 's/special/regular/g' '{}' \+;

Answer 4

For rename version rename from util-linux 2.23.2 the following command worked for me:

find . -type f -exec rename mariadb mariadb-proxy '{}' \;

Answer 5

For those just wanting to rename directories you can use this command:

find /your/target/path/ -type d -execdir rename 's/special/regular/' '{}' \;

Note type is now d for directory, and using -execdir.

I haven't been able to work out how to rename both files and directories in a single pass though.

Someone commented earlier that once it renamed the root folder then it couldn't traverse the file tree any more. There is a -d switch available that does a depth traversal from the bottom-up, so the root would be renamed last I believe:

find -d /your/target/path/ -type d -execdir rename 's/special/regular/' '{}' \;

From the manpage (man find):

 -d      Cause find to perform a depth-first traversal, i.e., directories are visited in post-order and all entries in a directory will be
         acted on before the directory itself.  By default, find visits directories in pre-order, i.e., before their contents.  Note, the
         default is not a breadth-first traversal.

Answer 6

If you don't mind installing another tool, then you can use rnm:

rnm -rs '/special/regular/g' -dp -1 *

It will go through all directories/sub-directories (because of -dp -1) and replace special with regular in their names.