Change extension of file using shell script
How to change extension of all *.dat files in a directory to *.txt. Shell script should take the directory name as an argument. Can take multiple directories as arguments. Print the log of command result in appending mode with date and timestamp.
10 Answers 10
Bash can do all of the heavy lifting such as extracting the extension and tagging on a new one. For example:
for file in $1/*.dat ; do mv "$file" "$.txt" ; done Welcome to Stack Overflow! While this code snippet may solve the question, including an explanation really helps to improve the quality of your post. Remember that you are answering the question for readers in the future, and those people might not know the reasons for your code suggestion.
# change .htm files to .html for file in *.htm ; do mv $file `echo $file | sed 's/\(.*\.\)htm/\1html/'` ; done # change .html files to .htm for file in *.html ; do mv $file `echo $file | sed 's/\(.*\.\)html/\1htm/'` ; done #change .html files to .shtml for file in *.html ; do mv $file `echo $file | sed 's/\(.*\.\)html/\1shtml/'` ; done #change .html files to php for file in *.html ; do mv $file `echo $file | sed 's/\(.*\.\)html/\1php/'` ; done # change .dat files to .txt for file in *.dat ; do mv $file `echo $file | sed 's/\(.*\.\)dat /\1txt/'` ; done @Kaz The $
@SebastianGodelet There is no difference between $
#!/bin/bash for d in $*; do for f in $(ls $d/*.dat); do echo $(date) $(mv -v $f $.txt) done done Output redirection should be done by the shell when running the script
Leaving out argument validity checks
#!/bin/bash if [ $# -lt 2 ] then echo "Usage `basename $0` " exit 85 # exit status for wrong number of arguments. fi for directories do for files in $(ls $directories/*.dat); do echo $(date) $(mv -v $files $.txt) done done The first for loop by default loops on the $@ i.e. command-line arguments passed.
Follow Pben’s solution, if your filename contains blank space, you should use double quotation marks to the variable like the following:
#remove the space in file name #example file name:19-014-0100.mp3 .mp3 #result file name:19-014-0100.mp3 $ for file in *.mp3 ; do target=`echo "$file" | sed 's/ //g'`; echo "$target"; mv "$file" "$target"; done; #remove the duplicate file extension in file name #example file name:19-014-0100.mp3.mp3 #result file name:19-014-0100.mp3 $ for file in *.mp3 ; do target=`echo "$file" | sed 's/\.mp3\.mp3$/.mp3/g'`; echo "$target"; mv "$file" "$target"; done; To rename (changing extention) all my html files on epub files I use this command line :
find . -name "*.html*" -exec rename -v 's/\.html$/\.epub/i' <> \; rename command renames the filenames supplied according to the rule specified as the first argument. To install the rename command in ubuntu, run sudo apt install rename .
Script, first finds the names of the given extensions. It removes the extension from names. Then adds backslash() for identification of terminal.
Then the ‘mv’ command executed. Here the ‘.temp’ folder is used to hide the process from user, in GUI.
#!/bin/sh if [ $# -ne 3 ] then echo "Usage: ./script folder current_extension modify_extension" exit fi mkdir .temp find $1 -name "*.$2" > .temp/output_1 && sed "s/$2//" .temp/output_1 > .temp/output_2 && sed -e "s/[ \t]/\\\ /g" .temp/output_2 > .temp/output_3 while read line do mv -v "$line""$2" "$line""$3" done < .temp/output_3 rm -rf .temp The output files are saved inside the '.temp' folder,later the '.temp' folder is removed.
How do I change extension of multiple files recursively from the command line?
I have many files with .abc extension and want to change them to .edefg
How to do this from command line ? I have a root folder with many sub-folders, so the solution should work recursively.
9 Answers 9
A portable way (which will work on any POSIX compliant system):
find /the/path -depth -name "*.abc" -exec sh -c 'mv "$1" "$.edefg"' _ <> \; In bash4, you can use globstar to get recursive globs (**):
shopt -s globstar for file in /the/path/**/*.abc; do mv "$file" "$.edefg" done The (perl) rename command in Ubuntu can rename files using perl regular expression syntax, which you can combine with globstar or find :
# Using globstar shopt -s globstar files=(/the/path/**/*.abc) # Best to process the files in chunks to avoid exceeding the maximum argument # length. 100 at a time is probably good enough. # See http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/095 for ((i = 0; i < $; i += 100)); do rename 's/\.abc$/.edefg/' "$" done # Using find: find /the/path -depth -name "*.abc" -exec rename 's/\.abc$/.edefg/' <> + @user2757729, it does replace it. "$<1%.abc>" expands to the value of $1 except without .abc at the end. See faq 100 for more on shell string manipulations.
I ran this on a ~70k files file structure. at least on my shell it most definitely did not replace it.
In case anyone else is wondering what the underscore is doing in the first command, it's needed because with sh -c the first argument is assigned to $0 and any remaining arguments are assigned to the positional parameters. So the _ is a dummy argument, and '<>' is the first positional argument to sh -c .
This will do the required task if all the files are in the same folder
To rename the files recursively use this:
find /path/to/root/folder -type f -name '*.abc' -print0 | xargs -0 rename 's/.abc$/.edefg/' Great tip, thanks ! Where can I find more documentation about the little piece of regex's syntax ? Like what's the s at the beginning, and what other options can I use in there. Thanks !
@Anto very late but fwiw and for future reader the s at the beginning stands for substitute the / are the delimiters which can, in theory, be any character as long that character doesn't need to be replaced and the $ mean "at the end of the string" which comes from regex
One problem with recursive renames is that whatever method you use to locate the files, it passes the whole path to rename , not just the file name. That makes it hard to do complex renames in nested folders.
I use find 's -execdir action to solve this problem. If you use -execdir instead of -exec , the specified command is run from the subdirectory containing the matched file. So, instead of passing the whole path to rename , it only passes ./filename . That makes it much easier to write the regex.
find /the/path -type f \ -name '*.abc' \ -execdir rename 's/\.\/(.+)\.abc$/version1_$1.abc/' '<>' \; - -type f means only look for files, not directories
- -name '*.abc' means only match filenames that end in .abc
- '<>' is the placeholder that marks the place where -execdir will insert the found path. The single-quotes are required, to allow it to handle file names with spaces and shell characters.
- The backslashes after -type and -name are the bash line-continuation character. I use them to make this example more readable, but they are not needed if you put your command all on one line.
- However, the backslash at the end of the -execdir line is required. It is there to escape the semicolon, which terminates the command run by -execdir . Fun!
- s/ start of the regex
- \.\/ match the leading ./ that -execdir passes in. Use \ to escape the . and / metacharacters (note: this part vary depending on your version of find . See comment from user @apollo)
- (.+) match the filename. The parentheses capture the match for later use
- \.abc escape the dot, match the abc
- $ anchor the match at the end of the string
- / marks the end of the "match" part of the regex, and the start of the "replace" part
- version1_ add this text to every file name
- $1 references the existing filename, because we captured it with parentheses. If you use multiple sets of parentheses in the "match" part, you can refer to them here using $2, $3, etc.
- .abc the new file name will end in .abc. No need to escape the dot metacharacter here in the "replace" section
- / end of the regex
tree --charset=ascii |-- a_file.abc |-- Another.abc |-- Not_this.def `-- dir1 `-- nested_file.abc tree --charset=ascii |-- version1_a_file.abc |-- version1_Another.abc |-- Not_this.def `-- dir1 `-- version1_nested_file.abc Hint: rename 's -n option is useful. It does a dry run and shows you what names it will change, but does not make any changes.
Thanks for the details explanation, but strangely, when I try this, the --execdir did not pass in the leading ./ so the \.\/ part in the regex can be omitted. May that is because I am on OSX not ubuntu
find /the/path -depth -type f -name "*.abc" -exec sh -c 'mv -- "$1" "$(dirname "$1")/$(basename "$1" .abc).edefg"' _ '<>' \; Welcome to Ask Ubuntu! While this is a valuable answer, I recommend expanding it (by editing) to explain how and why that command works.
# Rename all *.txt to *.text for f in *.txt; do mv -- "$f" "$.text" done Also see the entry on why you shouldn't parse ls .
Edit: if you have to use basename your syntax would be:
for f in *.txt; do mv -- "$f" "$(basename "$f" .txt).text" done The ; matches zero or more */ and corresponds to #1 in the replacement. The * corresponds to #2 . The non-recursive version would be
This is what I did and worked pretty just the way I wanted. I used the mv command. I had multiple .3gp files and I wanted to rename them all to .mp4
Here's a short oneliner for it:
for i in *.3gp; do mv -- "$i" "ren-$i.mp4"; done Which simply scans through the current directory, picks up all .3gp files, then renames (using the mv) into ren-name_of_file.mp4
@muru but the principle still exist. Simply select any extension then specify the destination extension to get them renamed. The .3gp or .mp4 here were just for illustration purposes.
The syntax is preferrable, one-liner and easy to understand. However, I would use basename "$i" .mp4 to remove the previous extension instead of "ren-$i.mp4".
I found an easy way to achieve this. To change extensions of many files from jpg to pdf, use:
for file in /path/to; do mv $file $(basename -s jpg $file)pdf ; done Rename files and directories with find -execdir | rename
If you are going to rename both files and directories not simply with a suffix, then this is a good pattern:
PATH="$(echo "$PATH" | sed -E 's/(^|:)[^\/][^:]*//g')" \ find . -depth -execdir rename 's/findme/replaceme/' '<>' \; The awesome -execdir option does a cd into the directory before executing the rename command, unlike -exec .
-depth ensure that the renaming happens first on children, and then on parents, to prevent potential problems with missing parent directories.
-execdir is required because rename does not play well with non-basename input paths, e.g. the following fails:
rename 's/findme/replaceme/g' acc/acc The PATH hacking is required because -execdir has one very annoying drawback: find is extremely opinionated and refuses to do anything with -execdir if you have any relative paths in your PATH environment variable, e.g. ./node_modules/.bin , failing with:
find: The relative path ‘./node_modules/.bin’ is included in the PATH environment variable, which is insecure in combination with the -execdir action of find. Please remove that entry from $PATH
-execdir is a GNU find extension to POSIX. rename is Perl based and comes from the rename package. Tested in Ubuntu 18.10.
Rename lookahead workaround
If your input paths don't come from find , or if you've had enough of the relative path annoyance, we can use some Perl lookahead to safely rename directories as in:
git ls-files | sort -r | xargs rename 's/findme(. *\/)\/?$/replaceme/g' '<>' The sort -r is required to ensure that files come after their respective directories, since longer paths come after shorter ones with the same prefix.