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Bash recursively replace many spaces with names

Can anyone recommend a safe solution for recursively replacing spaces with underscores in file and directory names starting at a given root directory? For example,

$ tree
...
| - a dir
| `- file with spaces.txt
`- b dir
    | - another file with spaces.txt
    `- yet another file with spaces.pdf

becomes:

$ tree
...
| - a_dir
| `- file_with_spaces.txt
`- b_dir
    | - another_file_with_spaces.txt
    `- yet_another_file_with_spaces.pdf

I copied the question by another user, which is the main question, but I need to add another problem:

I am using the following solution:

$ find -depth -name '* *' -execdir rename " " "_" {} +;

It works, but only replaces the first whitespace found on an element (dir or file). Any ideas on how to create a loop to find spaces and stop when they go away?

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5 answers


If you don't have one rename

available, or if you're not sure which version you have, here's a way to achieve it:



find . -depth -name '* *' -execdir bash -c 'for i; do mv "$i" "${i// /_}"; done' _ {} +
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You can use:



find . -depth -name '* *' -execdir rename 's/ /_/g' {} +
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Here's a solution without rename 

find -type d -name "* *" -print | awk '{print;gsub(" ","_",$0);print}' | xargs -r -n2 -d "\n" mv
find         -name "* *" -print | awk '{print;gsub(" ","_",$0);print}' | xargs -r -n2 -d "\n" mv

I am assuming there is no \n

.

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You can also change the variable IFS

to IFS

use line endings instead of spaces in the loop:

IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b") ; for file in $(find . -type f) ; do mv -v $file ${file// /_} ; done

https://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/handling-filenames-with-spaces-in-bash.html

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Thanks to Jokki for his input. The only one I tried worked recursively.

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