UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

Try something like:

Code:

for i in ~/Shell_Practice/rename/*.txt 
do  
  if [ -e "$i" ]; then
    mv -- "$i" "${i/file/newfile}"
  fi
done

or

Code:

shopt -s nullglob
for i in ~/Shell_Practice/rename/*.txt 
do  
  mv -- "$i" "${i/file/newfile}"
done

You never answered the question of whether a file named filexfile.txt should be moved to newfilexfile.txt or to newfilexnewfile.txt. And, I'm disappointed that you didn't try to rewrite your code based on the comments I provided in post #2 in this thread. But, I did make (at least) one mistake in that post. If you run the command:

Code:

mv file1 file2

where file1 and file2 are the same and name an existing file or if file1 and file2 are different but both names are pathnames that refer to the same file (because they are linked together), the standards require that one of three things happen:Note that none of the suggestions that have been posted in this thread (including the two suggestions below) make any attempt to verify that the new pathname you want to use is not linked to the current pathname. The code below at least makes sure that when mv is invoked, the two operands won't be the same string. If there is a chance that the old and new names you are trying to create for a file could refer to the same file, I leave it to you to make adjustments to the code if any system on which you run your script has a mv utility that does not behave the way you want it to behave.

If you really don't want to use the shell's "${path/file/newfile}" variable expansion because it is not in the standards yet or because you really do want to be able to replace multiple occurrences of file with newfile if you run into a pathname containing multiple occurrences of that string, and you really want to use

Code:

awk

or

Code:

sed

to solve this problem; at least consider something like the following so you aren't invoking awk or sed and a shell for each pathname you process and so you don't invoke mv to move a file whose name won't change because it didn't contain the string file to begin with:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
set -vx

for path in ~/Shell_Practice/rename/*file*.txt 
do	[ -e "$path" ] && printf '%s\n' "$path"
done | awk '
{	old = $0
	gsub(/file/, "newfile")
	print "echo mv --", "\""old"\"", "\""$0"\""
}' | bash -xv

or (preferably):

Code:

#!/bin/bash
set -vx

for path in ~/Shell_Practice/rename/*file*.txt 
do	[ -e "$path" ] && printf '%s\n' "$path"
done | sed 'p; s/file/newfile/g' | while read -r oldpath && read -r newpath
do	echo mv -- "$oldpath" "$newpath"
done

If one of these prints the mv commands you want to invoke, remove the word echo from the script and run it again to actually rename the files.

Obviously, the awk script could also be rewritten to get rid of the second invocation of bash. I will leave doing that set of trivial changes as an exercise for the reader.