UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have many files that have "inputstring" somewhere in their filename (without the quotes), and I want to rename them all so that "inputstring" is replaced with "newstring". And I also want to specify arbitrary text for "inputstring" and "newstring" so that I can call the scripts that does this like this:

batchrename apple peer

This should rename all files in present directory that have "apple" somewhere in their filename, and change "apple" into "peer".

I have found some batch rename scripts, but they all depend on fixed values of the string that should be replaced, and that means I have to rewrite a new script each time I want to do this with different strings.

Thanks for your help.

Code:

#!/bin/sh
ls -1 *$1* | awk -v old="$1" -v new="$2" 'BEGIN{q="\047"}
{           oldfile=$0
	    sub(old,new)	    
	    cmd = sprintf("mv %s%s%s %s%s%s",q,oldfile,q,q,$0,q)
	    cmd | getline #or system(cmd)
}'

With zsh:

Code:

$ autoload -U zmv
$ touch 123inputstringABC ABCinputstring123
$ ls -l *string*
-rw-r--r-- 1 Administrator None 0 May 21 16:53 123inputstringABC
-rw-r--r-- 1 Administrator None 0 May 21 16:53 ABCinputstring123
$ zmv '(*)inputstring(*)' '${1}newstring${2}'
$ ls -l *string*
-rw-r--r-- 1 Administrator None 0 May 21 16:53 123newstringABC
-rw-r--r-- 1 Administrator None 0 May 21 16:53 ABCnewstring123

It works! Thanks.

(untested)

Code:

## NAME: batchrename
## USAGE: batchrename STRING1 STRING2
## DESCRIPTION:
##    rename all files with STRING1 in their name
##    by replacing STRING1 with STRING2

STRING1=$1
STRING2=$2
for file in *"$STRING1"*
do
  mv "$file" "${file%%"$STRING1"*}$STRING2${file#*"$STRING1"}"
done

I discovered that my Linux comes with the "rename" utility.
Usage: "rename inputstring newstring"

But good to know how to write a script yourself.

There are at least two different versions of rename on Linux systems, and their syntax is not the same. If you write a script that uses rename, it may not work on another Linux system, and almost certainly will not work on any other *nix system.