rename appears useless in Ubuntu

[Sylphid]

On Wed, 06 May 2009 21:57:08 -0400
anthony baldwin <baldwinlinguas at gmail.com> wrote:

> Greetings,
> 
> I have a little script to remove spaces from file names, and it was 
> working when I was using PCLinuxOS, but not on Ubuntu.
> I used to be able to cd to a dir and do "nospace"(what I named the 
> script), and it would ask me for a file extension, remove the space, and 
> ask for a cookie.  But on Ubuntu it does not rename the spaces.
> I can't figure for the life of me why...
> 
> Here it is:
> #!/bin/bash
> 
> # nospace
> # replace spaces with underscores
> 
> echo "What kind of files do you wish to rename.  Please enter the file 
> extension:"
> 
> read a
> 
> for i in $(ls -1 *$a)
> do
> rename \  _ *.$a
> done
> 
> ls -1 *$a
> 
> echo "All done.  Gimme a cookie!"
> 
> exit
> 
> 
> I have also tried to simply do
> 
> rename \  _ *.pdf (or whatever extension)
> , which, to my knowledge, without the loop, would remove the first
> space in any such file name, and have to be repeated, of course, to 
> remove all spaces,
> but, it does nothing.
> 
> I get no errors, but I also get no results.
> It appears to read the variable "a" for the file extension, and
> ls -1 *$a seems to list the files of that extension.
> So, the only thing that isn't productive here is rename.
> 
> I've even tried to do
> rename pdf PDF *.pdf
> just to test rename, then I get an error, which I would not have seen in 
> PCLOS.
> In PCLOS, this would have changed file.pdf to file.PDF without a hiccough.
> In Ubuntu I get "Bareword "pdf" not allowed while "strict subs" in use 
> at (eval 1) line 1."
> 
> So, apparently I'm confused about why rename seems completely useless in 
> Ubuntu.
> 
> Thanks.
> /tony
> 
> -- 
> http://www.baldwinlinguas.com
> translations & interpreting
> 
> 
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> 


Try this instead

rename 's/\ /_/g' *.pdf

I'm not sure how rename functions in PCLinuxOS but ubuntu uses perlexpr, the rename man page has examples of this.


-----------
Scott Coil <scott at chaos-dragon.com>