Working with directories, need assistance Post: 302343846

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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

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dh_usrlocal

DH_USRLOCAL(1)							     Debhelper							    DH_USRLOCAL(1)

NAME

       dh_usrlocal - migrate usr/local directories to maintainer scripts

SYNOPSIS

       dh_usrlocal [debhelperoptions] [-n]

DESCRIPTION

       dh_usrlocal is a debhelper program that can be used for building packages that will provide a subdirectory in /usr/local when installed.

       It finds subdirectories of usr/local in the package build directory, and removes them, replacing them with maintainer script snippets
       (unless -n is used) to create the directories at install time, and remove them when the package is removed, in a manner compliant with
       Debian policy. These snippets are inserted into the maintainer scripts by dh_installdeb. See dh_installdeb(1) for an explanation of
       debhelper maintainer script snippets.

       When the Rules-Requires-Root field is not (effectively) binary-targets, the directories in /usr/local will have ownership root:staff and
       the mode will be 02775.	These values have been chosen to comply with the recommendations of the Debian policy for directories in
       /usr/local.

       When Rules-Requires-Root has an effective value of binary-targets, the owners, groups and permissions will be preserved with one exception.
       If the directory is owned by root:root, then ownership will be reset to root:staff and mode will be reset to 02775. This is useful, since
       that is the group and mode policy recommends for directories in /usr/local.

OPTIONS

       -n, --no-scripts
	   Do not modify postinst/prerm scripts.

NOTES

       Note that this command is not idempotent. dh_prep(1) should be called between invocations of this command. Otherwise, it may cause multiple
       instances of the same text to be added to maintainer scripts.

CONFORMS TO

       Debian policy, version 2.2

SEE ALSO

       debhelper(7)

       This program is a part of debhelper.

AUTHOR

       Andrew Stribblehill <ads@debian.org>

11.1.6ubuntu2							    2018-05-10							    DH_USRLOCAL(1)