Renaming the files and folders using text files

Question

I am trying to rename the files and directories using a text file separated by space.

The files.txt looks like this:

dir1-1 dir1_1
dir2-1 dir223_1

My command is as follows:

xargs -r -a **files.txt** -L1 mv

The files look like this (in directory 1):

dir1-1.txt dir1-1.gzip dir1-1-something.text

The output for the files should look like this (in the dir1-1):

dir1_1.txt dir1_1.gzip dir1_1-something.text

The files in directory (dir2) looks like this:

dir2-1.py dir2-1.txt dir2-1.text

The output should look like this:

dir223_1.py dir223_1.txt dir223_1.text

This command can rename only folders from dir1-1 to dir1_1 and dir2-1to dir223_1so on but it doesn't rename the files in the subdirectories. The files in the corresponding directories also have these prefix of these directories. (like dir1-1.txt dir1-1.gzip dir1-1.csv)

It will be somewhat similar like: Script for renaming files using text file containing alternate file names

Looking forward for the assistance.

Answer 1

There's lots of ways of doing this, but here's a very simple and straight-forward example of one way to do this:

$ cat files.txt 
dir1-1 dir1_1
dir2-1 dir223_1

$ cat rename.sh
#!/bin/bash

# make some dirs and files to test with:
d='dir1-1'; mkdir "$d"; for ext in .txt .gzip -something.txt; do touch "$d/$d$ext" ; done
d='dir2-1'; mkdir "$d"; for ext in .py .txt .text; do touch "$d/$d$ext" ; done

# now rename them:
while read -r old new ; do
  # rename the directory too
  mv -v "$old" "$new"

  # and rename the files
  if [ -d "$new" ] ; then
    for f in "$new/"* ; do
      mv -v "$f" "$(printf "%s" "$f" | sed -e "s/$old/$new/g")"
    done
  fi
  echo
done < files.txt

$ chmod +x rename.sh

$ ./rename.sh 
renamed 'dir1-1' -> 'dir1_1'
renamed 'dir1_1/dir1-1.gzip' -> 'dir1_1/dir1_1.gzip'
renamed 'dir1_1/dir1-1-something.txt' -> 'dir1_1/dir1_1-something.txt'
renamed 'dir1_1/dir1-1.txt' -> 'dir1_1/dir1_1.txt'

renamed 'dir2-1' -> 'dir223_1'
renamed 'dir223_1/dir2-1.py' -> 'dir223_1/dir223_1.py'
renamed 'dir223_1/dir2-1.text' -> 'dir223_1/dir223_1.text'
renamed 'dir223_1/dir2-1.txt' -> 'dir223_1/dir223_1.txt'

NOTE: Because your files.txt has a single space separating the old and the new patterns for file and directory name, and also because I'm using read with the default IFS setting of $' \t\n' (space, tab, or newline), the following script will work with any filename patterns that don't have those characters (or a / because that's being used as the delimiter in sed) in them.