Linux - Replacing spaces in the file names

Question

I have a number of files in a folder, and I want to replace every space character in all file names with underscores. How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

Use sh...

for i in *' '*; do   mv "$i" `echo $i | sed -e 's/ /_/g'`; done

If you want to try this out before pulling the trigger just change mv to echo mv.

Answer 2

If you use bash:

for file in *; do mv "$file" ${file// /_}; done

Answer 3

This should do it:

for file in *; do mv "$file" `echo $file | tr ' ' '_'` ; done

Answer 4

Quote your variables:

for file in *; do echo mv "'$file'" "${file// /_}"; done

Remove the "echo" to do the actual rename.

Answer 5

To rename all the files with a .py extension use, find . -iname "*.py" -type f | xargs -I% rename "s/ /_/g" "%"

Sample output,

$ find . -iname "*.py" -type f                                                     
./Sample File.py
./Sample/Sample File.py
$ find . -iname "*.py" -type f | xargs -I% rename "s/ /_/g" "%"
$ find . -iname "*.py" -type f                                                     
./Sample/Sample_File.py
./Sample_File.py

Answer 6

The easiest way to replace a string (space character in your case) with another string in Linux is using sed. You can do it as follows

sed -i 's/\s/_/g' *

Hope this helps.