CODEWITHSUNDEEP
unixcommand-linescriptingreplacefilenames
gran_profaci
gran_profaci

Reputation: 8473

Remove underscores from all filenames within a directory

I have a folder "model" with files named like:

a_EmployeeData
a_TableData
b_TestData
b_TestModel

I basically need to drop the underscore and make them:

aEmployeeData
aTableData
bTestData
bTestModel

Is there away in the Unix Command Line to do so?

Upvotes: 5

Views: 14046

Answers (8)

Nathan C.
Nathan C.

Reputation: 319

Use the global flag /g with your replace pattern to replace all occurrences within the filename.

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rename 's/_//g'

Or if you want underscores replaced with spaces then use this:

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rename 's/_/ /g'

If you like to live dangerously add the force flag -f in front of your replace pattern rename -f 's/_//g'

Upvotes: 0

wjandrea
wjandrea

Reputation: 33159

I had the same problem on my machine, but the filenames had more than one underscore. I used rename with the g option so that all underscores get removed:

find model/ -maxdepth 1 -type f | rename 's/_//g'

Or if there are no subdirectories, just 

rename 's/_//g'

If you don't have rename, see Jaypal Singh's answer.

Upvotes: 0

Stephane Chazelas
Stephane Chazelas

Reputation: 6259

In zsh:

autoload zmv # in ~/.zshrc
cd model && zmv '(**/)(*)' '$1${2//_}'

Upvotes: 1

Bitz
Bitz

Reputation: 49

for f in model/* ; do mv "$f" `echo "$f" | sed 's/_//g'` ; done

Edit: modified a few things thanks to suggestions by others, but I'm afraid my code is still bad for strange filenames.

Upvotes: 3

jlliagre
jlliagre

Reputation: 30863

This will correctly process files containing odd characters like spaces or even newlines and should work on any Unix / Linux distribution being only based on POSIX syntax.

find model -type f -name "*_*" -exec sh -c 'd=$(dirname "$1"); mv "$1" "$d/$(basename "$1" | tr -d _)"' sh {} \;

Here is what it does:

For each file (not directory) containing an underscore in its name under the model directory and its subdirectories, rename the file in place with all the underscores stripped out.

Upvotes: 5

clt60
clt60

Reputation: 63974

maybe this:

find model -name "*_*" -type f -maxdepth 1 -print |  sed -e 'p;s/_//g' | xargs -n2 echo mv

Decomposition:

  • find all plain files in the directory model what contains at least one underscore, and don't search subdirectories
  • with the sed make filename adjustments - replace the _ with nothing
  • also print the old name
  • fed the two filenames to xargs what will rename the files with mv

The above is for a dry-run. When satisfied, remove the echo before mv for actual rename.

Warning: Will not work if filename contains spaces. If you have GNU sed you can

find . -name "*_*" -maxdepth 1 -print0 |  sed -z 'p;s/_//g' | xargs -0 -n2 echo mv

and will works with a filenames with spaces too...

Upvotes: 1

jaypal singh
jaypal singh

Reputation: 77185

You can do this simply with bash. 

for file in /path/to/model/*; do
mv "$file" "${file/_/}"
done

If you have rename command available then simply do

rename 's/_//' /path/to/model/*

Upvotes: 7

Marc B
Marc B

Reputation: 360872

marc@panic:~$ echo 'a_EmployeeData' | tr -d '_'
aEmployeeData

Upvotes: 0

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