Find & Replace

[Dave]

Thank you very much, this is a tremendous help! I will likely backup my
files this weekend and give it a go. I'll let you know the results when I'm
finnished.

Cheers,

On 2/20/06, James Gray <james at grayonline.id.au> wrote:
>
> On Tuesday 21 February 2006 10:15, Dave wrote:
> > I guess this is more of a general Linux question, and not specific to
> > Kubuntu. When I install Kubuntu I had copied my hard drive from a
> previous
> > installation of Mepis, which in turn was taken directly from Windows. to
> > make a long story short, it's been several years now and I still have
> > Windows-style names for all my files. meaning they use a lot of CAPS and
> > SPACES.
> >
> > Is there a bash command (similar to awk) that would allow me to search
> out
> > all the spaces in my file names and replace them with underscores
> > (recursive from home folder)? Or perhaps one of you already has
> a  script
> > that could help with this task? I have Googled this a number of times
> and
> > feel like I have exhausted all other avenues, even a point in the right
> > direction would be greatly appreciated.
>
> How about a script like this:
>
> ---- SCRIPT: de-windowize.sh ----
> #!/bin/bash
>
> # See if a command line arg was passed
> if [ ! -z $1 ]; then
>   # We have a command line arg - was it a directory??
>   if [ -d $1 ]; then
>     # Wonderful! We were given a directory to clean up!
>     echo -n "Changing to $1 - "
>     cd $1 2&>/dev/null
>     if [ $? = 0 ]; then
>       # YAY! We're in the directory
>       echo "DONE"
>     else
>       # Couldn't change to the directory...WTF?!
>       echo "Couldn't change to $1! ERROR!!"
>       exit 1
>     fi
>   else
>     # It wasn't a directory - bail out!
>     echo "That's NOT a directory (idiot!) :P"
>     exit 1
>   fi
> fi
>
> # RIGHT! Now that we've handled all the command line fru, do the work!
> for OLD in *
>   do
>     NEW=`echo $OLD|sed s/\ /\_/g | tr [:upper:] [:lower:]`
>     echo "OLD=\"$OLD\""
>     echo "NEW=\"$NEW\""
>     echo -e "mv \"$OLD\" \"$NEW\"\n"
>   done
> ---- SCRIPT: de-windowize.sh ----
> (then make it executeable: chmod a+x dewindowize.sh)
>
> This will do the following to ALL files in the CURRENT directory, or the
> directory specified on the command line:
> 1. Replace ALL spaces with "_" (sed s/\ /\_/g)
> 2. Convert ALL UPPER case characters to lower case (tr [:upper:]
> [:lower:])
>
> eg,
> /path/to/dewindowize.sh
> will fix up the current directory
>
> /path/todewindowize.sh ~/music/
> will fix up the files in the ~/music/ directory (but nothing beneath it!)
>
> To recurse a directory tree, you do something like this:
> find ~/music/ -type d -exec /path/to/dewindowize.sh {} \;
>
> The script will NOT follow symbolic links, but WILL lowercase+de-space the
> link's name.
>
> All the work is actually done at the bottom of the script in the "for"
> loop.
> man bash  (or "help for" without the "")
> man sed
> man tr
>
> > Additionally I would like confirmation that what I'm trying to do won't
> > cause problems, most of the files I want renamed are music and picture
> > files.
>
> Shouldn't cause any major problems, but Linux is a case sensitive system
> that
> will barf if you have symlinks pointing to the old files - the links will
> break.  Also, many programs will think you've removed all your old files
> and
> replaced them with totally different files - this may cause media players
> to
> rescan your collection, backup scripts to backup them ALL up (recent
> ctime/atime/mtime) etc.  No biggie, but something you mightn't think of
> immediately.
>
> Feel free to play with that script - it's not very efficient, it's not
> very
> well thought out but it's free and thrown together off the top of my head
> offline on the train...
>
> Cheers,
>
> > I currently run Kubuntu 5.1 Breezy in KDE.
>
> Me too :) Both i686 and an AMD64 version :P
>
> Cheers,
>
> James
> --
> Never trust anybody whose arm is bigger than your leg.
>
> --
> kubuntu-users mailing list
> kubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/kubuntu-users
>



--
Dave Sterken
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