Working with directories, need assistance Post: 302343846

Sponsored Content

Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Working with directories, need assistance Post 302343846 by gratuitous_arp on Thursday 13th of August 2009 08:24:55 PM

08-13-2009

Registered User

This is one solution.

The first matter of business is to reverse the order of the matches, so you are looking at the last matches first, which will be the deepest subdirectories/files in a particular tree. This will prevent you from renaming a parent directory first, and later having an invalid path to a subdirectory. You can use 'tac' to reverse the order of the matches returned by find.

You are getting the error message because you are replacing all spaces in the line with underscores, including those in the path. However, the mv command will only rename the filename (or directory) given after the last slash, not the entire path including a filename.

For example, if I have a directory structure like this (with spaces):

parent dir
\_ sub dir

And I do this to change the spaces into underscores:

Code:

mv   ./parent\ dir/sub\ dir   ./parent_dir/sub_dir

mv is going to give me an error because parent_dir (with underscores) does not exist for sub\ dir to be placed there. mv is only operating on sub\ dir, and it is given an invalid path.

To prevent this, separate the filename from the path, so you can operate on the filename separately from the path. The 'dirname' and 'basename' commands help you do this.

Lastly, use sed to replace all spaces in the filename with underscores, then glue the path and filename back together in your mv command.

Changing your code around, it would end up looking something like this:

Code:

#!/bin/bash

find . -name "* *" | tac | while read file ; do

        directory=`dirname "$file"`
        target=`basename "$file" | sed "s/ /_/g"`
        echo "Renaming '$file' to '${directory}/${target}'"
        mv "$file" "${directory}/${target}"

done

gratuitous_arp

View Public Profile for gratuitous_arp

Find all posts by gratuitous_arp

9 More Discussions You Might Find Interesting

1. Shell Programming and Scripting

how to change working directories in perl?

i am new to perl. i am writing a perl script. i want to know how to change the working directories? for ex. i have a perl script in c:\proj\ . i want to run this script in this directory but i need my script to change its working directory to D:\xyz\ dynamically in the script. your help is...

2. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Listing only directories in the current working directory using the "ls" command

Hello All, I am trying to list only directories in my current directory using the command "ls -d". But the output only contains the default directory "." and doesn't list the rest of the directories in the working directory. Can anyone explain why this is happening

3. Shell Programming and Scripting

Working with multiple home directories.

I need to rename a directory in every home directory on a given workstation. I am a newb to scripting so maybe thats why I cant exactly figure out how to correctly do this. The first thing I need to be able to do to write this script is figure out how to list all the directorys (these are not...

4. Shell Programming and Scripting

Script for parsing directories one level and finding directories older than n days

Hello all, Here's the deal...I have one directory with many subdirs and files. What I want to find out is who is keeping old files and directories...say files and dirs that they didn't use since a number of n days, only one level under the initial dir. Output to a file. A script for...

5. UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

wget assistance to manage parent directories...

looking for a wget option that does not retrieve entire path from source box... currently working with the following syntax: wget --no-verbose --mirror --no-parent --no-host-directories --page-requisites --ftp-user=mis --ftp-password=secret ftp://192.x.x.x/tmp/test is anyone familiar...

6. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Using grep command to find the pattern of text in all directories and sub-directories.

Hi all, Using grep command, i want to find the pattern of text in all directories and sub-directories. e.g: if i want to search for a pattern named "parmeter", i used the command grep -i "param" ../* is this correct?

7. Shell Programming and Scripting

Perl Script not working on all directories

Hi Folks, I have a script that I am using. The files are in Directory c:\files\change\options In that directory I have many other sub folders like R1 R2 R5 E4 etc... When I run this script in windows, It looks like its just changing the first folder R1 and not the rest. Can I get an...

8. Shell Programming and Scripting

Grep with Regular expression now working on file directories

Hello Everyone, I have a file sam1 with the below content SYSYSID;MANDT;/SIE/AD_Z0M_INDX;/SIE/AD_Z0M_KEY1 echo $Regex \bSYSYSID\b|\bMANDT\b|\b/SIE/AD_Z0M_INDX\b|\b/SIE/AD_Z0M_KEY1\b cat sam1 | grep -Eo $Regex I expect the result as SYSYSID MANDT /SIE/AD_Z0M_INDX /SIE/AD_Z0M_KEY1...

9. Solaris

Giving read write permission to user for specific directories and sub directories.

I have searched this quite a long time but couldn't find the right method for me to use. I need to assign read write permission to the user for specific directories and it's sub directories and files. I do not want to use ACL. This is for Solaris. Please help.

LEARN ABOUT OSX

dirname

DIRNAME(3)						   BSD Library Functions Manual 						DIRNAME(3)

NAME

     dirname -- extract the directory part of a pathname

SYNOPSIS

     #include <libgen.h>

     char *
     dirname(char *path);

DESCRIPTION

     The dirname() function is the converse of basename(3); it returns a pointer to the parent directory of the pathname pointed to by path.  Any
     trailing '/' characters are not counted as part of the directory name.  If path is a null pointer, the empty string, or contains no '/' char-
     acters, dirname() returns a pointer to the string ".", signifying the current directory.

IMPLEMENTATION NOTES

     The dirname() function returns a pointer to internal storage space allocated on the first call that will be overwritten by subsequent calls.

     Other vendor implementations of dirname() may modify the contents of the string passed to dirname(); if portability is desired, this should
     be taken into account when writing code which calls this function.

LEGACY SYNOPSIS

     #include <libgen.h>

     char *
     dirname(const char *path);

     In legacy mode, path will not be changed.

RETURN VALUES

     On successful completion, dirname() returns a pointer to the parent directory of path.

     If dirname() fails, a null pointer is returned and the global variable errno is set to indicate the error.

ERRORS

     The following error codes may be set in errno:

     [ENAMETOOLONG]	The path component to be returned was larger than MAXPATHLEN.

SEE ALSO

     basename(1), dirname(1), basename(3), compat(5)

STANDARDS

     The dirname() function conforms to X/Open Portability Guide Issue 4, Version 2 (``XPG4.2'').

HISTORY

     The dirname() function first appeared in OpenBSD 2.2 and FreeBSD 4.2.

AUTHORS

     Todd C. Miller

BSD
								 October 12, 2006							       BSD