UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I am trying to create a script that will search for a directory named bob, and then rename that directory to peter. I do not want the directory path to change.

so /folders/bob

would become /folders/peter

It seems to be renaming the bob folder to peter correctly, but the peter folder ends up in the directory I am currently in. How can I make it so that it stays in the proper directory? I have been searching around for answers but other people seem to be renaming/moving their files to specific directories. Since I am searching for the file, I will not know what directory it is until the search result comes back.

Thank you for your time

This is what I tried

Code:

for i in `find . -name "bob"`
 do
      mv "$i" "peter"
 done

I don't recommend using for to iterate over the output of a program.
You can use a while read loop, so that paths with spaces aren't broken. Even better, you can use find's -exec so path's with newline aren't troublesome either.

If you have bash or korn shell you can use ${var%/*} to turn /full/path/to/bob into /full/path/to, in this way you can place peter in that destination.

Code:

find . -depth -name "bob" -exec bash -c 'dest=${1%/*}; mv "$1" "$dest/peter"' _ {} \;

Your script can rename:./path/to/a/lower/directory/bob
to just plain ./peter.

Code:

find . -type d -name bob |
while read dname
do
   dir=$(dirname $dname)
   mv $dname ${dir}/peter
done