UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi and good day,

[i have Mac OS 10.9.5 and bash]

In Terminal I tried

Code:

mv *.rtf.rtf *.rtf

to get rid of double rtf extensions ( which came about from some other process),
but this doesn't work.

I don't know why.

Also it should be for the main and for subfolders.
with

Code:

-R

?

Anyway, any assistance would be greatly appreciated!

With best regards,
Omar KN

Lets take your first code:

Code:

 mv *.rtf.rtf *.rtf

How will the system know how to rename anything dot rtf.rtf to anything dot rtf?
The only case this would work is when moving files to a directory e.g.

Code:

 mv *.rtf  rtf/.

And so I let you conclude...

What you can do is write a script using find that searches all files with rtf.rtf extension to be replaced by .rtf...

Well, yes I would need first to find all ".rtf.rtf" files,
[then pipe the result - XX No]

then replace those found, with a simple .rtf extension.

So with

Code:

find . -type f -iname "*.rtf.rtf"

I'll find my files, but they are quite a few, and now how to change the duplicated extension for those files, without doing it manually for each?

PS: I'd prefer to leave them in the folders where they belong, if possible.

/
with best regards,
Omar KN
Stockholm, Sweden

You could just use a for loop:

Code:

for filename in $(find . -type f -iname "*.rtf.rtf")
do
   mv ${filename} ${filename%.rtf}
done

(If you have filenames with spaces in them or uppercase suffixes then you'll need to make it a bit smarter)

Remember two important things. First, that * does not get passed into programs, the shell handles that before mv even runs. Second, that mv works like

Code:

mv source [source, source, ...] destination

Imagine you have these three files in the folder:

file1.rtf file2.rtf.rtf file3.rtf

Your command will expand to:

mv (all files matching *.rtf.rtf) (all files matching *.rtf)

which would be:

mv file2.rtf.rtf file1.rtf file2.rtf.rtf file3.rtf

...and then, mv gets run, with those exact arguments.

If it actually did what you asked, it would destroy most of them, leaving only one survivor named 'file3.rtf'. Fortunately it will refuse to rename multiple files, only move them.

Code:

 mv ${filename} ${filename%.rtf}

So the found files are moved (changed), but what does % do?

/
with best regards,
Omar KN
Stockholm, Sweden

It removes .rtf from the end of the name.

And, whether or not your pathnames might contain space or tab characters, you should always write your code to allow for that possibility:

Code:

find . -type f -name "*.rtf.rtf" | while read -r path
do      mv "${path}" "${path%.rtf}"
done