Optimal procedure to rename files in a linux directory - regex

This question pertains to renaming files in a directory on a Linux system wherein the affected files appear in this general format:
index.html?p=155
index.html?page_id=10
index.html?author=2&paged=5
index.html?feed=rss2&tag=search-engine
index.html?tag=social-media
Might there be a shell level "rename" command that I can use to replace the question marks (?) with an underscore (_) in each file within a directory?
Thank you in advance for any advice or information!

I would prefer the rename command myself, though sometimes a roll-your-own for loop can be more targeted.
Note: rename takes a sed expression as the argument to change and filenames as the last argument. The proper call to use would be:
rename 's/\?/_/' index*
because the ? indicates 0 or 1 of a preceding character when not \ escaped.
This is also easier to toss into a find command which can operate recursively, etc:
find . -name index.html* -exec rename 's/\?/_/' {} +

for file in index.html\?*; do
new=${file/\?/_} # Substitute underscore for ?
mv "$file" "$new" # Rename the file
done
See the Parameter Expansion section of the bash man page for information on the substitution syntax used.

You can use the rename command.
rename '?' '_' *
The first parameter is the expression you want to replace, the second argument is the string to replace the first parameter with, and the final option is the selection of files to apply it to ( all in the current directory, in this case )
See the man page for more details.http://ss64.com/bash/rename.html

Related

Iterating over directory with specified path in Bash

pathToBins=$1
bins="${pathToBins}contigs.fa.metabat-bins-*"
for fileName in $bins
do
echo $fileName
done
My goal is to attach a path to my file name. I can iterate over a folder and get the file name when I don't attach the path. My challenge is when I add the path echo fileName my regular expression no longer works and I get "/home/erikrasmussen/Desktop/Script/realLargeMetaBatBinscontigs.fa.metabat-bins-*" where the regular expression '*' is treated like a string. How can I get the path and also the full file name while iterating over a folder of files?
Although I don't really know how your files are arranged on your hard drive, a casual glance at "/home/erikrasmussen/Desktop/Script/realLargeMetaBatBinscontigs.fa.metabat-bins-*" suggests that it is missing a / before contigs. If that is the case, then you should change your definition of bins to:
bins="${pathToBins}/contigs.fa.metabat-bins-*"
However, it is much more robust to use bash arrays instead of relying on filenames to not include whitespace and metacharacters. So I would suggest:
bins=(${pathToBins}/contigs.fa.metabat-bins-*)
for fileName in "${bins[#]}"
do
echo "$fileName"
done
Bash normally does not expand a pattern which doesn't match any file, so in that case you will see the original pattern. If you use the array formulation above, you could set the bash option nullglob, which will cause the unmatched pattern to vanish instead, leaving an empty array.

Mass rename in shell script

I have a bunch of files which are of this format:
blabla.log.YYYY.MM.DD
Where YYYY.MM.DD is something like (2016.01.18)
I have quite a few folders with about 1000 files in each, so I wanted to have a simple script to rename them. I want to rename them to
blabla.log
So basically, I'm just stripping the date at the end. Here is what I have:
for f in [a-zA-Z]*.log.[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9].[0-9][0-9].[0-9][0-9]; do
mv -v $f ${f#[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9].[0-9][0-9].[0-9][0-9]};
done
This script outputs this:
mv: `blabla.log.2016.01.18' and `blabla.log.2016.01.18' are the same file
For more information:
I'm on windows, but I run this script in gitbash
For some reason, my gitbash doesn't recognize the "rename" command
Some regex patterns (like [0-9]{4} don't seem to work)
I'm really at a lost. Thanks.
EDIT: I need to rename every single file that has a date at the end and that is of the from: *.log.2016.01.18. They all need to keep their original names. All that should change is the removal of the date.
You have to use % instead of #: you want to remove from the end, not the start of your string.
Also, you're missing a . in what has to be removed, you don't want to end up with blabla.log..
Quoting the variable names prevents surprises when file names contain special characters.
Together:
mv -v "$f" "${f%.[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9].[0-9][0-9].[0-9][0-9]}"

bulk file renaming in bash, to remove name with spaces, leaving trailing digits

Can a bash/shell expert help me in this? Each time I use PDF to split large pdf file (say its name is X.pdf) into separate pages, where each page is one pdf file, it creates files with this pattern
"X 1.pdf"
"X 2.pdf"
"X 3.pdf" etc...
The file name "X" above is the original file name, which can be anything. It then adds one space after the name, then the page number. Page numbers always start from 1 and up to how many pages. There is no option in adobe PDF to change this.
I need to run a shell command to simply remove/strip out all the "X " part, and just leave the digits, like this
1.pdf
2.pdf
3.pdf
....
100.pdf ...etc..
Not being good in pattern matching, not sure what regular expression I need.
I know I need something like
for i in *.pdf; do mv "$i$" ........; done
And it is the ....... part I do not know how to do.
This only needs to run on Linux/Unix system.
Use sed..
for i in *.pdf; do mv "$i" $(sed 's/.*[[:blank:]]//' <<< "$i"); done
And it would be simple through rename
rename 's/.*\s//' *.pdf
You can remove everything up to (including) the last space in the variable with this:
${i##* }
That's "star space" after the double hash, meaning "anything followed by space". ${i#* } would remove up to the first space.
So run this to check:
for i in *.pdf; do echo mv -i -- "$i" "${i##* }" ; done
and remove the echo if it looks good. The -i suggested by Gordon Davisson will prompt you before overwriting, and -- signifies end of options, which prevents things from blowing up if you ever have filenames starting with -.
If you just want to do bulk renaming of files (or directories) and don't mind using external tools, then here's mine: rnm
The command to do what you want would be:
rnm -rs '/.*\s//' *.pdf
.*\s selects the part before (and with) the last white space and replaces it with empty string.
Note:
It doesn't overwrite any existing files (throws warning if it finds an existing file with the target name).
And this operation is failsafe. You can get back the changes made by last rnm command with rnm -u.
Here's a list of documents for rnm.

export filenames to temp file bash

I have a lot of files in multiple directories that all have the following setup for the filename:
prob123456_01
I want to delete the trailing "_01" off of each file name and export them to a temp file. How exactly would I delete the trailing "_01" as well as export? I am rather new to scripting so any help would be greatly appreciated!
As you've tagged with bash, I'll assume that you can use globstar
shopt -s globstar # enable globstar
for f in **_[0-9][0-9]; do echo "${f%_*}"; done > tmp
With globstar enabled, the pattern **_[0-9][0-9] matches any file ending in _, followed by any 2 digit number, in the current directory and any subdirectories. ${f%_*} removes the end of the file name using bash's built-in string manipulation functionality.
Better yet, as Charles Duffy suggests (thanks), you can use an array instead of a loop:
files=( **_[0-9][0-9] ); printf '%s\n' "${files[#]%_*}"
The array is filled the filenames that match the same pattern as before. ${files[#]%_*} removes the last part from each element of the array and passes them all as arguments to printf, which prints each result on a separate line.
Either of these approaches is likely to be quicker than using find as everything is done in the shell, without executing any separate processes.
Previously I had suggested to use the pattern **_{00..99}, although this is not ideal for a couple of reasons. It is less efficient, as it expands to **_00, **_01, **_02, ..., **_99. Also, any of those 100 patterns that don't match will be included literally in the output unless another option, nullglob is enabled.
It's up to you whether you use [0-9] or [[:digit:]] but the advantage of the latter is that it matches all characters defined to be a digit, which may vary depending on your locale. If this isn't a concern, I would go with the former.
If I understand you correctly, you want a list of the filenames without the trailing _01. The following would do that:
find . -type f -name '*_01' | sed 's/_01$//' > tmp.lst
find . -type f -name '*_01' looks for all the files in the current directory, and its descendent directories, for files with names ending in _01.
| is the so-called pipe, handing the results of the left-hand call to the right-hand call.
sed 's/_01$//' removes the _01 from the end of each filename.
> tmp.lst writes the result into the file tmp.lst
These are all pretty basic parts of working with bash and its likes, so it might be a good idea to look at a tutorial or two and familiarize yourself with those and a few others ;)

Apply regular expression substitution globally to many files with a script

I want to apply a certain regular expression substitution globally to about 40 Javascript files in and under a directory. I'm a vim user, but doing this by hand can be tedious and error-prone, so I'd like to automate it with a script.
I tried sed, but handling more than one line at a time is awkward, especially if there is no limit to how many lines the pattern might match.
I also tried this script (on a single file, for testing):
ex $1 <<EOF
gs/,\(\_\s*[\]})]\)/\1/
EOF
The pattern will eliminate a trailing comma in any Perl/Ruby-style list, so that "[a, b, c,]" will come out as "[a, b, c]" in order to satisfy Internet Explorer, which alone among browsers, chokes on such lists.
The pattern works beautifully in vim but does nothing if I run it in ex, as per the above script.
Can anyone see what I might be missing?
You asked for a script, but you mentioned that you are vim user. I tend to do project-wide find and replace inside of vim, like so:
:args **/*.js | argdo %s/,\(\_\s*[\]})]\)/\1/ge | update
This is very similar to the :bufdo solution mentioned by another commenter, but it will use your args list rather than your buflist (and thus doesn't require a brand new vim session nor for you to be careful about closing buffers you don't want touched).
:args **/*.js - sets your arglist to contain all .js files in this directory and subdirectories
| - pipe is vim's command separator, letting us have multiple commands on one line
:argdo - run the following command(s) on all arguments. it will "swallow" subsequent pipes
% - a range representing the whole file
:s - substitute command, which you already know about
:s_flags, ge - global (substitute as many times per line as possible) and suppress errors (i.e. "No match")
| - this pipe is "swallowed" by the :argdo, so the following command also operates once per argument
:update - like :write but only when the buffer has been modified
This pattern will obviously work for any vim command which you want to run on multiple files, so it's a handy one to keep in mind. For example, I like to use it to remove trailing whitespace (%s/\s\+$//), set uniform line-endings (set ff=unix) or file encoding (set filencoding=utf8), and retab my files.
1) Open all the files with vim:
bash$ vim $(find . -name '*.js')
2) Apply substitute command to all files:
:bufdo %s/,\(\_\s*[\]})]\)/\1/ge
3) Save all the files and quit:
:wall
:q
I think you'll need to recheck your search pattern, it doesn't look right. I think where you have \_\s* you should have \_s* instead.
Edit: You should also use the /ge options for the :s... command (I've added these above).
You can automate the actions of both vi and ex by passing the argument +'command' from the command line, which enables them to be used as text filters.
In your situation, the following command should work fine:
find /path/to/dir -name '*.js' | xargs ex +'%s/,\(\_\s*[\]})]\)/\1/g' +'wq!'
you can use a combination of the find command and sed
find /path -type f -iname "*.js" -exec sed -i.bak 's/,[ \t]*]/]/' "{}" +;
If you are on windows, Notepad++ allows you to run simple regexes on all opened files.
Search for ,\s*\] and replace with ]
should work for the type of lists you describe.