Search+replace strings in filenames

Question

Using bash, how can I search for all occurrences of the substring \'foo\' in all filenames (including folders) contained recursively in a directory and replace them them wit

Answer 1

This was tricky because of directory names with multiple instances of "foo". When you change ./foo_test/xfoo to ./bar_test/xbar everything that was in ./foo_test becomes inaccessible. So I changed the file names first then changed the last occurrence of "foo" in the directory names. I added echo statements to track what's going on during development. You can, of course, expunge them.

#!/bin/sh
#first change the file names
#append '.' to process files in current directory
for D in $(find -d . -name "*foo*" -type d ) '.' 
do 
    pushd $D >> /dev/null
    echo 'directory: ' "$D"
    for file in $(find . -name "*foo*" -type f -maxdepth 1)
    do
        echo '    change' "$file" 'to' `echo "$file" | sed s/foo/bar/g`
        mv "$file" `echo "$file" | sed s/foo/bar/g`
    done
    popd >> /dev/null
done

echo ''

#Now change the directory names
for D in $(find -d . -name "*foo*" -type d )
do 
    echo 'change' "$D" 'to' `echo "$D" | sed 's/\(.*\)foo/\1bar/'`
    #change only the last occurance of foo
    mv "$D" `echo "$D" | sed 's/\(.*\)foo/\1bar/'`
done

I have no doubt there are shorter, more elegant ways to do this (probably just by removing half of the lines in this script), but I'm pretty sure this works.

---

EDIT The identical loops were a red flag. This version only loops once. You get a message attempting mv '.' '.', but it's safely ignored.

#!/bin/sh
#first change the file names
#append '.' to change file in current directory
for D in $(find -d . -name "*foo*" -type d ) '.' 
do 
    pushd $D >> /dev/null
    echo 'directory: ' "$D"
    for file in $(find . -name "*foo*" -type f -maxdepth 1)
    do
        echo '    change' "$file" 'to' `echo "$file" | sed s/foo/bar/g`
        mv "$file" `echo "$file" | sed s/foo/bar/g`
    done
    popd >> /dev/null

    echo 'change' "$D" 'to' `echo "$D" | sed 's/\(.*\)foo/\1bar/'`
    #change only the last occurence of foo
    mv "$D" `echo "$D" | sed 's/\(.*\)foo/\1bar/'`
done

Answer 2

Both variations shown here using work correctly on OPs test structure:

find . -depth -name '*foo*' -execdir bash -c 'mv -i "$1" "${1//foo/bar}"' bash {} \;

or, if you have a very large number of files and want it to run faster:

find . -depth -name '*foo*' -execdir bash -c 'for f; do mv -i "$f" "${f//foo/bar}"; done' bash {} +

EDIT: As noted in the comments, my earlier answer using a find command that did not use the execdir option and using rename has problems renaming files in directories that contain foo in their name. As suggested, I have changed the find commands to use -execdir, and I have deleted the variation using the rename command since it is a non-standard command.