Recursively rename files using find and sed

Question

I want to go through a bunch of directories and rename all files that end in _test.rb to end in _spec.rb instead. It's something I've never quite figured out how to do with bash so this time I thought I'd put some effort in to get it nailed. I've so far come up short though, my best effort is:

find spec -name "*_test.rb" -exec echo mv {} `echo {} | sed s/test/spec/` \;

NB: there's an extra echo after exec so that the command is printed instead of run while I'm testing it.

When I run it the output for each matched filename is:

mv original original

i.e. the substitution by sed has been lost. What's the trick?

Gamages

BTW, I'm aware that there's a rename command but I'd really like to figure out how to do it using sed so that I can do more powerful commands in the future. – Gamages

Please don't cross-post. – Celestinecelestite

Possible duplicate of Rename multiple files in Unix, https://mcmap.net/q/129312/-rename-multiple-files-in-shell-duplicate/608639, Rename multiple files by replacing a particular pattern in the filenames using a shell script, Find directories with names matching pattern and move them, Rename multiple files shell, etc. – Sike

Answer 1

This happens because sed receives the string {} as input, as can be verified with:

find . -exec echo `echo "{}" | sed 's/./foo/g'` \;

which prints foofoo for each file in the directory, recursively. The reason for this behavior is that the pipeline is executed once, by the shell, when it expands the entire command.

There is no way of quoting the sed pipeline in such a way that find will execute it for every file, since find doesn't execute commands via the shell and has no notion of pipelines or backquotes. The GNU findutils manual explains how to perform a similar task by putting the pipeline in a separate shell script:

#!/bin/sh
echo "$1" | sed 's/_test.rb$/_spec.rb/'

(There may be some perverse way of using sh -c and a ton of quotes to do all this in one command, but I'm not going to try.)

Kitchenette

For those wondering about the perverse usage of sh -c here it is: find spec -name "*_test.rb" -exec sh -c 'echo mv "$1" "$(echo "$1" | sed s/test.rb\$/spec.rb/)"' _ {} \; – Gamages

@Gamages what the heck is that _ for? great solution - but i like ramtam answer more :) – Alkaloid

Cheers! Saved me a lot of headaches. For the sake of completeness this is how I pipe it to a script: find . -name "file" -exec sh /path/to/script.sh {} \; – Purtenance

Answer 2

To solve it in a way most close to the original problem would be probably using xargs "args per command line" option:

find . -name "*_test.rb" | sed -e "p;s/test/spec/" | xargs -n2 mv

It finds the files in the current working directory recursively, echoes the original file name (p) and then a modified name (s/test/spec/) and feeds it all to mv in pairs (xargs -n2). Beware that in this case the path itself shouldn't contain a string test.

Varmint

Unfortunately this has white space issues. So using with folders that have spaces in the name will break it at xargs (confirm with -p for verbose/interactive mode) – Fungous

That's exactly what I was looking for. Too bad for the white space issue (I didn't test it, though). But for my current needs it's perfect. I'd suggest to test it first with "echo" instead of "mv" as parameter in "xargs". – Juryman

If you need to deal with whitespace in paths and you're using GNU sed >= 4.2.2 then you can use the -z option along with finds -print0 and xargs -0: find -name '*._test.rb' -print0 | sed -ze "p;s/test/spec/" | xargs -0 -n2 mv – Glazing

Best solution. So much faster than find -exec. Thank you – Daybreak

This won't work, if there are multiple test folders in one path. sed will only rename first one and mv command will fail on No such file or directory error. – Ouster

you can exclude folders with 'find . -type f ' ... to list only files, or reverse, if you only want to rename folders with 'find . -type d ' ... – Harass

Answer 3

you might want to consider other way like

for file in $(find . -name "*_test.rb")
do 
  echo mv $file `echo $file | sed s/_test.rb$/_spec.rb/`
done

Temporary

That does look like a good way to do it. I'm really looking to crack the one liner though, to improve my knowledge more than anything else. – Gamages

for file in $(find . -name "*_test.rb"); do echo mv $file echo $file | sed s/_test.rb$/_spec.rb/; done is a one-liner, is it not? – Sansbury

This will not work if you have filenames with spaces. for will split them into separate words. You can make it work by instructing the for loop to split only on newlines. See cyberciti.biz/tips/handling-filenames-with-spaces-in-bash.html for examples. – Shannashannah

I agree with @onitake, although I would prefer to use the -exec option from find. – Authenticity

Answer 4

I find this one shorter

find . -name '*_test.rb' -exec bash -c 'echo mv $0 ${0/test.rb/spec.rb}' {} \;

Rasla

Hi, I think '_test.rb" should be '_test.rb' (double quote to single quote). Can I ask why you're using the underscore to push the argument you want to position $1 when it seems to me that find . -name '*_test.rb' -exec bash -c 'echo mv $0 ${0/test.rb/spec.rb}' {} \; works? As would find . -name '*_test.rb' -exec bash -c 'echo mv $1 ${1/test.rb/spec.rb}' iAmArgumentZero {} \; – Tellurium

Thanks for your suggestions, fixed – Rasla

Thanks for clearing that up - I only commented because I spent a while pondering the meaning of _ thinking it was maybe some trick use of $_ ('_' is pretty hard to search for in docs!) – Tellurium

Answer 5

You can do it without sed, if you want:

for i in `find -name '*_test.rb'` ; do mv $i ${i%%_test.rb}_spec.rb ; done

${var%%suffix} strips suffix from the value of var.

or, to do it using sed:

for i in `find -name '*_test.rb'` ; do mv $i `echo $i | sed 's/test/spec/'` ; done

Soccer

this does not work (the sed one) as explained by the accepted answer. – Misprision

@Ali, It does work--I tested it myself when I wrote the answer. @larsman's explanation does not apply to for i in... ; do ... ; done, which executes commands via the shell and does understand backtick. – Soccer

Answer 6

You mention that you are using bash as your shell, in which case you don't actually need find and sed to achieve the batch renaming you're after...

Assuming you are using bash as your shell:

$ echo $SHELL
/bin/bash
$ _

... and assuming you have enabled the so-called globstar shell option:

$ shopt -p globstar
shopt -s globstar
$ _

... and finally assuming you have installed the rename utility (found in the util-linux-ng package)

$ which rename
/usr/bin/rename
$ _

... then you can achieve the batch renaming in a bash one-liner as follows:

$ rename _test _spec **/*_test.rb

(the globstar shell option will ensure that bash finds all matching *_test.rb files, no matter how deeply they are nested in the directory hierarchy... use help shopt to find out how to set the option)

Kurrajong

Answer 7

The easiest way:

find . -name "*_test.rb" | xargs rename s/_test/_spec/

The fastest way (assuming you have 4 processors):

find . -name "*_test.rb" | xargs -P 4 rename s/_test/_spec/

If you have a large number of files to process, it is possible that the list of filenames piped to xargs would cause the resulting command line to exceed the maximum length allowed.

You can check your system's limit using getconf ARG_MAX

On most linux systems you can use free -b or cat /proc/meminfo to find how much RAM you have to work with; Otherwise, use top or your systems activity monitor app.

A safer way (assuming you have 1000000 bytes of ram to work with):

find . -name "*_test.rb" | xargs -s 1000000 rename s/_test/_spec/

Whitsuntide

Answer 8

Here is what worked for me when the file names had spaces in them. The example below recursively renames all .dar files to .zip files:

find . -name "*.dar" -exec bash -c 'mv "$0" "`echo \"$0\" | sed s/.dar/.zip/`"' {} \;

Lashawnda

Answer 9

For this you don't need sed. You can perfectly get alone with a while loop fed with the result of find through a process substitution.

So if you have a find expression that selects the needed files, then use the syntax:

while IFS= read -r file; do
     echo "mv $file ${file%_test.rb}_spec.rb"  # remove "echo" when OK!
done < <(find -name "*_test.rb")

This will find files and rename all of them striping the string _test.rb from the end and appending _spec.rb.

For this step we use Shell Parameter Expansion where ${var%string} removes the shortest matching pattern "string" from $var.

$ file="HELLOa_test.rbBYE_test.rb"
$ echo "${file%_test.rb}"          # remove _test.rb from the end
HELLOa_test.rbBYE
$ echo "${file%_test.rb}_spec.rb"  # remove _test.rb and append _spec.rb
HELLOa_test.rbBYE_spec.rb

---

See an example:

$ tree
.
├── ab_testArb
├── a_test.rb
├── a_test.rb_test.rb
├── b_test.rb
├── c_test.hello
├── c_test.rb
└── mydir
    └── d_test.rb

$ while IFS= read -r file; do echo "mv $file ${file/_test.rb/_spec.rb}"; done < <(find -name "*_test.rb")
mv ./b_test.rb ./b_spec.rb
mv ./mydir/d_test.rb ./mydir/d_spec.rb
mv ./a_test.rb ./a_spec.rb
mv ./c_test.rb ./c_spec.rb

Scrubby

Thanks a lot! It helped me in easily removing trailing .gz from all file names recursively. while IFS= read -r file; do mv $file ${file%.gz}; done < <(find -type f -name "*.gz") – Samons

@CasualCoder nice to read that :) Note you can directly say find .... -exec mv .... Also, be careful with $file since it will fail if it contains spaces. Better use quotes "$file". – Scrubby

Answer 10

if you have Ruby (1.9+)

ruby -e 'Dir["**/*._test.rb"].each{|x|test(?f,x) and File.rename(x,x.gsub(/_test/,"_spec") ) }'

Carnify

Answer 11

In ramtam's answer which I like, the find portion works OK but the remainder does not if the path has spaces. I am not too familiar with sed, but I was able to modify that answer to:

find . -name "*_test.rb" | perl -pe 's/^((.*_)test.rb)$/"\1" "\2spec.rb"/' | xargs -n2 mv

I really needed a change like this because in my use case the final command looks more like

find . -name "olddir" | perl -pe 's/^((.*)olddir)$/"\1" "\2new directory"/' | xargs -n2 mv

Benefactor

Answer 12

I haven't the heart to do it all over again, but I wrote this in answer to Commandline Find Sed Exec. There the asker wanted to know how to move an entire tree, possibly excluding a directory or two, and rename all files and directories containing the string "OLD" to instead contain "NEW".

Besides describing the how with painstaking verbosity below, this method may also be unique in that it incorporates built-in debugging. It basically doesn't do anything at all as written except compile and save to a variable all commands it believes it should do in order to perform the work requested.

It also explicitly avoids loops as much as possible. Besides the sed recursive search for more than one match of the pattern there is no other recursion as far as I know.

And last, this is entirely null delimited - it doesn't trip on any character in any filename except the null. I don't think you should have that.

By the way, this is REALLY fast. Look:

% _mvnfind() { mv -n "${1}" "${2}" && cd "${2}"
> read -r SED <<SED
> :;s|${3}\(.*/[^/]*${5}\)|${4}\1|;t;:;s|\(${5}.*\)${3}|\1${4}|;t;s|^[0-9]*[\t]\(mv.*\)${5}|\1|p
> SED
> find . -name "*${3}*" -printf "%d\tmv %P ${5} %P\000" |
> sort -zg | sed -nz ${SED} | read -r ${6}
> echo <<EOF
> Prepared commands saved in variable: ${6}
> To view do: printf ${6} | tr "\000" "\n"
> To run do: sh <<EORUN
> $(printf ${6} | tr "\000" "\n")
> EORUN
> EOF
> }
% rm -rf "${UNNECESSARY:=/any/dirs/you/dont/want/moved}"
% time ( _mvnfind ${SRC=./test_tree} ${TGT=./mv_tree} \
> ${OLD=google} ${NEW=replacement_word} ${sed_sep=SsEeDd} \
> ${sh_io:=sh_io} ; printf %b\\000 "${sh_io}" | tr "\000" "\n" \
> | wc - ; echo ${sh_io} | tr "\000" "\n" |  tail -n 2 )

   <actual process time used:>
    0.06s user 0.03s system 106% cpu 0.090 total

   <output from wc:>

    Lines  Words  Bytes
    115     362   20691 -

    <output from tail:>

    mv .config/replacement_word-chrome-beta/Default/.../googlestars \
    .config/replacement_word-chrome-beta/Default/.../replacement_wordstars        

NOTE: The above function will likely require GNU versions of sed and find to properly handle the find printf and sed -z -e and :;recursive regex test;t calls. If these are not available to you the functionality can likely be duplicated with a few minor adjustments.

This should do everything you wanted from start to finish with very little fuss. I did fork with sed, but I was also practicing some sed recursive branching techniques so that's why I'm here. It's kind of like getting a discount haircut at a barber school, I guess. Here's the workflow:

• rm -rf ${UNNECESSARY}
  • I intentionally left out any functional call that might delete or destroy data of any kind. You mention that ./app might be unwanted. Delete it or move it elsewhere beforehand, or, alternatively, you could build in a \( -path PATTERN -exec rm -rf \{\} \) routine to find to do it programmatically, but that one's all yours.
• _mvnfind "${@}"
  • Declare its arguments and call the worker function. ${sh_io} is especially important in that it saves the return from the function. ${sed_sep} comes in a close second; this is an arbitrary string used to reference sed's recursion in the function. If ${sed_sep} is set to a value that could potentially be found in any of your path- or file-names acted upon... well, just don't let it be.
• mv -n $1 $2
  • The whole tree is moved from the beginning. It will save a lot of headache; believe me. The rest of what you want to do - the renaming - is simply a matter of filesystem metadata. If you were, for instance, moving this from one drive to another, or across filesystem boundaries of any kind, you're better off doing so at once with one command. It's also safer. Note the -noclobber option set for mv; as written, this function will not put ${SRC_DIR} where a ${TGT_DIR} already exists.
• read -R SED <<HEREDOC
  • I located all of sed's commands here to save on escaping hassles and read them into a variable to feed to sed below. Explanation below.
• find . -name ${OLD} -printf
  • We begin the find process. With find we search only for anything that needs renaming because we already did all of the place-to-place mv operations with the function's first command. Rather than take any direct action with find, like an exec call, for instance, we instead use it to build out the command-line dynamically with -printf.
• %dir-depth :tab: 'mv '%path-to-${SRC}' '${sed_sep}'%path-again :null delimiter:'
  • After find locates the files we need it directly builds and prints out (most) of the command we'll need to process your renaming. The %dir-depth tacked onto the beginning of each line will help to ensure we're not trying to rename a file or directory in the tree with a parent object that has yet to be renamed. find uses all sorts of optimization techniques to walk your filesystem tree and it is not a sure thing that it will return the data we need in a safe-for-operations order. This is why we next...
• sort -general-numerical -zero-delimited
  • We sort all of find's output based on %directory-depth so that the paths nearest in relationship to ${SRC} are worked first. This avoids possible errors involving mving files into non-existent locations, and it minimizes need to for recursive looping. (in fact, you might be hard-pressed to find a loop at all)
• sed -ex :rcrs;srch|(save${sep}*til)${OLD}|\saved${SUBSTNEW}|;til ${OLD=0}
  • I think this is the only loop in the whole script, and it only loops over the second %Path printed for each string in case it contains more than one ${OLD} value that might need replacing. All other solutions I imagined involved a second sed process, and while a short loop may not be desirable, certainly it beats spawning and forking an entire process.
  • So basically what sed does here is search for ${sed_sep}, then, having found it, saves it and all characters it encounters until it finds ${OLD}, which it then replaces with ${NEW}. It then heads back to ${sed_sep} and looks again for ${OLD}, in case it occurs more than once in the string. If it is not found, it prints the modified string to stdout (which it then catches again next) and ends the loop.
  • This avoids having to parse the entire string, and ensures that the first half of the mv command string, which needs to include ${OLD} of course, does include it, and the second half is altered as many times as is necessary to wipe the ${OLD} name from mv's destination path.
• sed -ex...-ex search|%dir_depth(save*)${sed_sep}|(only_saved)|out
  • The two -exec calls here happen without a second fork. In the first, as we've seen, we modify the mv command as supplied by find's -printf function command as necessary to properly alter all references of ${OLD} to ${NEW}, but in order to do so we had to use some arbitrary reference points which should not be included in the final output. So once sed finishes all it needs to do, we instruct it to wipe out its reference points from the hold-buffer before passing it along.

AND NOW WE'RE BACK AROUND

read will receive a command that looks like this:

% mv /path2/$SRC/$OLD_DIR/$OLD_FILE /same/path_w/$NEW_DIR/$NEW_FILE \000

It will read it into ${msg} as ${sh_io} which can be examined at will outside of the function.

Cool.

-Mike

Madelynmademoiselle

Answer 13

I was able handle filenames with spaces by following the examples suggested by onitake.

This doesn't break if the path contains spaces or the string test:

find . -name "*_test.rb" -print0 | while read -d $'\0' file
do
    echo mv "$file" "$(echo $file | sed s/test/spec/)"
done

Uchida

Answer 14

This is an example that should work in all cases. Works recursiveley, Need just shell, and support files names with spaces.

find spec -name "*_test.rb" -print0 | while read -d $'\0' file; do mv "$file" "`echo $file | sed s/test/spec/`"; done

Barracoon

Answer 15

$ find spec -name "*_test.rb"
spec/dir2/a_test.rb
spec/dir1/a_test.rb

$ find spec -name "*_test.rb" | xargs -n 1 /usr/bin/perl -e '($new=$ARGV[0]) =~ s/test/spec/; system(qq(mv),qq(-v), $ARGV[0], $new);'
`spec/dir2/a_test.rb' -> `spec/dir2/a_spec.rb'
`spec/dir1/a_test.rb' -> `spec/dir1/a_spec.rb'

$ find spec -name "*_spec.rb"
spec/dir2/b_spec.rb
spec/dir2/a_spec.rb
spec/dir1/a_spec.rb
spec/dir1/c_spec.rb

Pouch

Ah..i am not aware of a way to use sed other than putting the logic in a shell script and call that in exec. didnt see the requirement to use sed initially – Pouch

Answer 16

Your question seems to be about sed, but to accomplish your goal of recursive rename, I'd suggest the following, shamelessly ripped from another answer I gave here:recursive rename in bash

#!/bin/bash
IFS=$'\n'
function RecurseDirs
{
for f in "$@"
do
  newf=echo "${f}" | sed -e 's/^(.*_)test.rb$/\1spec.rb/g'
    echo "${f}" "${newf}"
    mv "${f}" "${newf}"
    f="${newf}"
  if [[ -d "${f}" ]]; then
    cd "${f}"
    RecurseDirs $(ls -1 ".")
  fi
done
cd ..
}
RecurseDirs .

Inflectional

How does the sed work without escaping () if you don't set the -r option? – Madelynmademoiselle

Answer 17

More secure way of doing rename with find utils and sed regular expression type:

  mkdir ~/practice

  cd ~/practice

  touch classic.txt.txt

  touch folk.txt.txt

Remove the ".txt.txt" extension as follows -

  cd ~/practice

  find . -name "*txt" -execdir sh -c 'mv "$0" `echo "$0" | sed -r 's/\.[[:alnum:]]+\.[[:alnum:]]+$//'`' {} \;

If you use the + in place of ; in order to work on batch mode, the above command will rename only the first matching file, but not the entire list of file matches by 'find'.

  find . -name "*txt" -execdir sh -c 'mv "$0" `echo "$0" | sed -r 's/\.[[:alnum:]]+\.[[:alnum:]]+$//'`' {} +

Strapless

Answer 18

Here's a nice oneliner that does the trick. Sed can't handle this right, especially if multiple variables are passed by xargs with -n 2. A bash substition would handle this easily like:

find ./spec -type f -name "*_test.rb" -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} sh -c 'export file={}; mv $file ${file/_test.rb/_spec.rb}'

Adding -type -f will limit the move operations to files only, -print 0 will handle empty spaces in paths.

Systaltic

Answer 19

I share this post as it is a bit related to question. Sorry for not providing more details. Hope it helps someone else. http://www.peteryu.ca/tutorials/shellscripting/batch_rename

Plasmosome

Answer 20

This is my working solution:

for FILE in {{FILE_PATTERN}}; do echo ${FILE} | mv ${FILE} $(sed 's/{{SOURCE_PATTERN}}/{{TARGET_PATTERN}}/g'); done

Ramin