Shell Programming and Scripting

I have a folder that contains many sub folders and files. This tree has to be backed up to an archive system. According to the tech support, one of the archives is failing to back up due to the possibility of trailing spaces on file and folder names. Therefore, I would like to have a script parse through this directory tree and remove trailing spaces from file and folder names. I would like to avoid replacing spaces with underscores and I would like to avoid removing spaces from the middle of the names.

For example, I have many folders that might be named something like this:

Code:

12345 Company Name

So assuming the above folder had a trailing space, I would want to remove JUST the trailing space.

Can I get some assistance with a script that could do that?

Thanks!

Moderator's Comments:

Without CODE tags, we can't tell the difference between one space and multiple spaces or tabs, and we can't see trailing whitespace characters. This post is confusing because there are no trailing spaces on your sample filename.

Can you please tell us what you have attempted so far?

I'm a mediocre script writer so the only thing I've managed to do so far is use a script I found that replaces all spaces with underscores. So my example folder I listed above ends up looking like this:

Code:

12345_Company_Name_

I managed to get that script to remove ALL spaces and change the name to this:

Code:

12345CompanyName

But I don't want that either.

Please use code tags as required by forum rules!

Not sure I understand what you are asking for. A listing of files in a directory with trailing spaces removed? One or many spaces? A script to rename all those files? In subdirectories as well? How far need the required assistance go?

Hint: you can get quite far using bash's parameter expansion (here: Remove matching prefix/suffix pattern):

Code:

FN="12345 Company Name          "

echo ">${FN%${FN##*[^ ]}}<"
>12345 Company Name<

echo mv \""$FN"\" \"${FN%${FN##*[^ ]}}\"
mv "12345 Company Name          " "12345 Company Name"

RudiC, thank you for the response. My apologies for forgetting the code. Didn't think it was necessary for just folder name examples.

I want to be able to parse through a folder, find all subdirectories and files under that folder that might have a trailing space and then remove that trailing space. So the script would basically be a rename script.

So far, I managed to successfully use a script that either renames the file or folder via replacing spaces with underscores or removing all of the spaces. I want to rename all found files and folders and only remove any trailing spaces.

How far do you get with the hint I gave?

I think this is working for me

Code:

find . -iname "* *" -printf '%p\0' | while IFS= read -r -d '' FN; do
	FNnew=`echo "${FN%${FN##*[^ ]}}"`
	echo "$FN" "$FNnew"
	mv "$FN" "${FN%${FN##*[^ ]}}"
done

I am running tests on a test folder structure now. The only thing it doesn't seem to do is remove the trailing space on files that have a dot extension.

for example:

Code:

this is a test .txt

my script will not remove the space after the word test. But, I believe this will not impact my larger issue and I can live without removing spaces on files like that. I'm more concerned with outside trailing spaces.

Thank you very much for the help. Any other tips are appreciated.

---------- Post updated at 02:27 PM ---------- Previous update was at 02:15 PM ----------

Actually, I have discovered a problem with this. If a folder containing a trailing space is fixed and renamed, any files with trailing spaces found under this folder are not fixed because the folder name is no longer found.