I am trying to write a housekeeping bash script. Part of it involves searching all of my attached storage media for photographs and moving them into a single directory. The problem occurs when files have duplicate names, obviously a file called 001.jpg will get overwritten with another file called 001.jpg. What I am trying to do is to get the script to rename a file with a duplicate filename on the fly, so that the name of the file with the duplicate name will be (for instance) 001[1].jpg the next file with the same file name will be 001[2].jpg etc etc.

So, if I have a line that reads:

 find / -name 000*.jpg

To have each file with an unique name, regardless:

typeset -i mCnt=1
for mFile in `find / -name 000*.jpg`
do
  mFirstPart=`echo $mFile | sed 's/\.jpg//'`
  mOutFile=${mFirstPart}'_'${mCnt}'.jpg'
  mCnt=${mCnt}+1
done

Thanks for the reply Shell_Life. It seems that your solution re-names each file in each directory, however, it still creates duplicate file names across directories. For instance, my first directory contains a file called 0000004.jpg...but so does my 10th and 13th directory. I can see from your code what it should be doing, it seems okay to me...I can't figure out why it isn't working as expected.

Stumpyuk,
Run the following and you will what it is doing:

typeset -i mCnt=1
for mFile in `find / -name 000*.jpg`
do
  mFirstPart=`echo $mFile | sed 's/\.jpg//'`
  mOutFile=${mFirstPart}'_'${mCnt}'.jpg'
  echo "New file = "${mOutFile}
  mCnt=${mCnt}+1
done

Thanks again, Shell_Life

When executed, the script prints a number of lines similar to:

New file = /home/usr/photos/00000021_254.jpg

However, when I go to the /home/usr/photos directory, the corresponding picture is still named '00000021.jpg' , none of the files have the expected '_##' suffix i.e they haven't actually been renamed.

I have tried adding the following line to your suggested code just before the "done" invocation:

mv $mFile output_dir

Stumpyuk,
I just wrote the basic script.
To rename the files, use the following:

typeset -i mCnt=1
for mFile in `find / -name 000*.jpg`
do
  mFirstPart=`echo $mFile | sed 's/\.jpg//'`
  mOutFile=${mFirstPart}'_'${mCnt}'.jpg'
  echo "New file = "${mOutFile}
  mv ${mFile} ${mOutFile}
  mCnt=${mCnt}+1
done