Recursively remove extension from all files with specific extension

Question

I have a directory with a bunch of subdirectories with a bunch of files with the extension .no_sub.

I want to rename every file with extension .no_sub to the same name with .no_sub removed.

So foo.no_sub -> foo.

Can I do this in Bash? (I am on Ubuntu 20.04)

Answer 1

Using standard find, sh, and mv:

find . -type f -name '*.no_sub' -exec sh -c '
    for pathname do
        mv -- "$pathname" "${pathname%.no_sub}"
    done' sh {} +

This finds any regular file with a name that ends in the string .no_sub, in or below the current directory. For batches of these pathnames, a short in-line shell script is called. This sh -c script iterates over the given batch of pathnames and renames each of them by removing the .no_sub filename suffix. The removal of the filename suffix is done using the standard ${variable%suffix} parameter expansion.

No check is made for filename collisions.

This is similar to the solution provided by Marcus Müller in that the renaming of an individual file happens in an identical way, but uses find to generate the list of pathnames for the loop in a way that will pick up hidden names and includes an explicit file type filter to iterate over regular files only.

See also: Understanding the -exec option of `find`

---

Since we know that each filename given to the inline script ends with .no_sub, we may avoid repeating .no_sub in there if we want to:

find . -type f -name '*.no_sub' -exec sh -c '
    for pathname do
        mv -- "$pathname" "${pathname%.*}"
    done' sh {} +

Answer 2

Use the power of your shell to get all files, then use the usual tools to rename them

shopt -s nullglob ## as recommended and explained in the comments
shopt -s globstar
shopt -s dotglob
for fname in **/*.no_sub ; do
  mv -- "${fname}" "${fname%.no_sub}"
done

Here,

• shopt -s globstar enables ** as a recursive glob
• shopt -s dotglob enables finding .*.no_sub
• The for loop is a special-character-safe way to go through all files (don't ever parse ls for that)
• The mv syntax is mv source target;
• I'm sometimes overly careful, but I also like ${fname} better than just $fname, because there can't be a variable name confusion. It just expands to the content of the variable fname, i.e. to the current file
• The variable expansion ${variable%pattern} expands to the variable content, but reduced by the suffix pattern pattern

Answer 3

You can do this with find and xargs:

find . -name '*.nosub' -print0 | xargs -0 rename .nosub ""

The -print0 option to find and the -0 option of xargs are there to correctly handle filenames with spaces. The rename command is the one provided by the util-linux package.

Answer 4

Using the perl rename utility (aka prename, file-rename, perl-rename on various different distros):

find . -type f -name '*.no_sub' -print0 |
  rename -0 's/\.no_sub$//'

Answer 5

Using POSIX find:

find . -type f -name '*.no_sub' \
-exec perl -le '
  rename $_, s/\.no_sub$//r
    for @ARGV;
' {} +;

We look for regular files whose Names end with .no_sub and place the names in a bunch on the commandline of perl.

Perl then invokes it's built-in rename command and removes the trailing extension .no_sub, in effect, moving the file.

Answer 6

No need for loops, just use the rename utility from the util-linux package.

$ /usr/bin/rename.ul '.no_sub' '' *.no_sub

See the rename man page, especially the last, "shortening" example in the EXAMPLES section.

Answer 7

Similar to Kusalananda's answer, but this will process the file one by one and without using a loop.

find . -type f -name '*.no_sub' -exec sh -c 'mv -- "$1" "${1%.no_sub}"' sh {} \;