Renaming third level directories to be same name

Question

I have a directory A, which contains a hundred sub-directories. Each one of these sub-directories contains a single directory.

How can I rename this single directory inside of each of the hundred directories to be the same name, say X? I have tried the mmv command, with no luck.

Any help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

Perhaps a better way, but:

Using bash and find

while IFS= read -r dir; do
    mv -- "$dir" "${dir%/*}/X"
done< <(find . -maxdepth 2 -mindepth 2 -type d)

DO a test run first with something like:

while IFS= read -r dir; do
    printf 'mv "%s" "%s"\n' "$dir" "${dir%/*}/X"
done< <(find . -maxdepth 2 -mindepth 2 -type d)

---

In short:

• find
  • . current directory as base (Typically A in your case)
  • type d (directory) at minimum and maximum depth of 2
• bash read $dir from find and move $dir to
  • ${dir%/*} remove last / and everything there after
    • /X append the new directory name.

Use for example find ./A ... if you reside one level below A etc.

Optionally add -v to mv (non-POSIX) to show actions taken.