find and mv - UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

muru · #1 (**permalink**) 06-29-2006

I have a.txt and b.txt (and so on ) in a directory.

I need to move these files to a.xml , b.xml and so on, basically I just need to rename all the XXX.txt files to XXX.xml using find and mv , how can we do it?
something like below, but it is not right
find . -name '*.txt' -exec mv {}\.xml \;
Any ideas?

Thanks
Muru

Corona688 · #2 (**permalink**) 06-29-2006

If you have the mmv command, you can just do

Code:

mmv '[ab].txt' '#1.xml'

Find won't do exactly what you want, it can't return PART of a filename. You'd have to just leave it printing the output, piping the names into some other script that filters the names.

muru · #3 (**permalink**) 06-29-2006

Thanks for your reply, unfortunately SunOs 5.7 doesn't seem to have mmv.

is there any way we could achieve this by following pseudo

find
mv [the file given by find to] ["work on the result of find to cut just the file name without extension" and add our extension (ie .xml)]

instead using cut and appening the .xml, could we use sed to replace extension to .xml and move the original file to this name?

I am sorry if this is not achievable.

Thanks
Muru

jim mcnamara · #4 (**permalink**) 06-29-2006

Code:

#!/bin/ksh
find /path -name '*.txt' | \
while read file
do
    newfile=${file%.txt}".xml"
    mv $file $newfile
done

I think Sun usually has ksh available

Hitori · #5 (**permalink**) 06-29-2006

You can use something like this:

#!/bin/sh

for vo in *.txt
do
ao=`echo $vo | sed "s/\..*$//"`
mv "$vo" "$ao".xml
done

muru · #6 (**permalink**) 06-29-2006

Thanks for the reply, both the above suggestions works.

Can we do it in a single line using something like this

for file in `ls *.txt` ;do mv $file `sed 's/\..*$/.txt/'`;done

this doesn;t work, but I feel that this may work with minor tweaks.

Thanks again for the reply!

jim mcnamara · #7 (**permalink**) 06-29-2006

Code:

find /path -name '*.txt' | while read file ;do ; newfile=${file%.txt}".xml" ; mv $file $newfile ; done

why one line - it's harder to read....

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