CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashfish
Acklavidian
Acklavidian

Reputation: 205

Bash script to remove leading white spaces from files names

So I have a bunch of files like:

 Aaron Lewis - Country Boy.cdg
 Aaron Lewis - Country Boy.mp3
 Adele - Rolling In The Deep.cdg
 Adele - Rolling In The Deep.mp3
 Adele - Set Fire To The Rain.cdg
 Adele - Set Fire To The Rain.mp3
 Band Perry - Better Dig Two.cdg
 Band Perry - Better Dig Two.mp3
 Band Perry - Pioneer.cdg
 Band Perry - Pioneer.mp3

and I need to have the leading whitespace removed in bash or fish script.

Upvotes: 5

Views: 3388

Answers (4)

imp25
imp25

Reputation: 2357

To remove the leading white space char in the file names you provided you can use:

 IFS=$'\n'
 for f in $(find . -type f -name ' *')
 do 
     mv $f ${f/\.\/ /\.\/}
 done

This:

  • changes the IFS to only be newline characters; this way it does not choke on the whitespaces in the file names.
  • finds all files starting with a whitespace in the current directory.
  • moves each file to a file name without the leading whitespace, using bash substring substitution.

Upvotes: 5

jaypal singh
jaypal singh

Reputation: 77155

You don't need sed for this. Just use bash string function:

for file in /path/to/files/*; 
    do mv "$file" "${file# *}"; 
done

Upvotes: 0

Ken
Ken

Reputation: 8897

cat <file> | sed -e 's/^[ ]*//'

should do the trick. Capture stdout and write to a file.

Upvotes: 0

lurker
lurker

Reputation: 58304

for x in \ * ; do
  mv "$x" `echo "$x" | sed "s/^ +//"`
done

This is quick and dirty.

Upvotes: 0

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