Renaming part of name of all files in a directory tree if match

Question

I have a directory tree like this

.
|-- players
|   |-- red_alice.plr
|   |-- red_bob.plr
|-- resources
|   |-- red_cash.rsc
|   |-- red_food.rsc

I want to go through all directories and rename any file that starts with "red" to instead start with "blue"...

I think it is work of find and sed commands but I am not sure how to formulate this situation...I know for example I can find files by

find . -name "red*" -type f

then how to use this output to rename red to blue?

Try find path_to_dir/ -type f -name 'red_*' -exec sh -c 'for f; do echo mv -- "$f" "${f/red/blue}"; done' _ {} + When satisfied, remove the echo part — Valentin Bajrami
– Valentin Bajrami, Commented Jan 10, 2019 at 13:21

Prvt_Yadav · Accepted Answer · 2019-01-10 13:52:05Z

1

You can do it with rename command:

find . -type f -name "red*" -exec rename  s/red/blue/g "{}" +;

So it will find the files with name starting with red and then will put all of them in single command like

 rename s/red/blue/g red_first red_second

It will search for files in all directories below the current directory.

answered Jan 10, 2019 at 13:31

Prvt_Yadav

6,0327 gold badges39 silver badges52 bronze badges

Ralf · Accepted Answer · 2019-01-10 12:00:39Z

0

Maybe like this:

find . -name "red_*" -exec bash -c 'echo mv "{}" "$(echo "{}" | sed "s%/red_%/blue_%" )"' \;

This just prints the commands. Good to check if it would actually work. If you verified that, remove the echo before mv.

answered Jan 10, 2019 at 12:00

Ralf

5272 silver badges10 bronze badges

2 Answers 2