Linux - Replacing Spaces in the File Names

How to replace spaces in file names using a bash script

Use rename (aka prename) which is a Perl script which may be on your system already. Do it in two steps:

find . -name "* *" -type d | rename 's/ /_/g'    # do the directories first
find . -name "* *" -type f | rename 's/ /_/g'

Based on Jürgen's answer and able to handle multiple layers of files and directories in a single bound using the "Revision 1.5 1998/12/18 16:16:31 rmb1" version of /usr/bin/rename (a Perl script):

find /tmp/ -depth -name "* *" -execdir rename 's/ /_/g' "{}" \;

Linux - Replacing spaces in the file names

This should do it:

for file in *; do mv "$file" `echo $file | tr ' ' '_'` ; done

Replace spaces in all files in a directory with underscores

find . -type f -exec sed -i -e 's/ /_/g' {} \;

find grabs all items in the directory (and subdirectories) that are files, and passes those filenames as arguments to the sed command using the {} \; notation. The sed command it appears you already understand.

if you only want to search the current directory, and ignore subdirectories, you can use

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec sed -i -e 's/ /_/g' {} \;

How to replace double spaces with one space in filenames (also subdirectories) (CloudLinux Server release 6.10)

find -iname \*.* | rename -v "s/\s{2}/ /g"

This is the final command which helped me out. I used perl rename, see answer by Gilles

sed replace spaces in directory names

sed is meant for search and replacement on files and not on directories in Linux/Unix. The -i flag in sed is used to make the text replacement on-the-fly on a file, the action simply does not make sense for a directory. You probably meant to change the name of the directory using sed on the filename and eventually use mv to rename the actual directory with the replaced string.

But you could just use mv in the first place with shell native features to replace white space with a - character.

for directory in **; do
    if [[ -d $directory ]] && [[ -w $directory ]]; then
        mv -- "$directory" "${directory// /-}"
    fi
done

Remove whitespaces from filenames in Linux

You could do something like this:

IFS="\n"
for file in *.jpg;
do
    mv "$file" "${file//[[:space:]]}"
done

Replace white space with underscore and make lower case - file name

rename 's/ +\././; y/A-Z /a-z_/'

Or, combined with find:

find /temp/ -depth -name "* *" -exec rename 's/ +\././; y/A-Z /a-z_/' {} +

To target only files, not directories, add -type f:

find /temp/ -depth -name "* *" -type f -exec rename 's/ +\././; y/A-Z /a-z_/' {} +

Shortening the names

Would it be possible to rename the file with the last three characters
of the original file for example from big Dog.txt to dog.txt?

Yes. Use this rename command:

rename 's/ +\././; y/A-Z /a-z_/; s/[^.]*([^.]{3})/$1/'

Replace parentheses and spaces in filenames with underscore

You can use:

find /tmp/ -depth -name "*[ ()]*" -execdir rename 's/[ )]/_/g; s/\(//g' "{}" \;

Rename files with spaces to underscore in all subcategories

Thanks to @Barmar. I used command from answer https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/223182/how-to-replace-spaces-in-all-file-names-with-underscore-in-linux-using-shell-scr/223185#223185

Just make sure its in two lines

---

Related Topics