Build a Renaming Script

Question

write a script that will check each folder/directory and rename the folder title if it contains the word “section.” The folder should be renamed to use the word “chapter” instead of “section”;Your script should be recursive, executing on each directory, subdirectory, and lower subdirectory, until all child directories have been checked and renamed.

For example:

supersectiondir-->subsectiondir-->lowersubsectiondir
should become:
superchapterdir-->subchapterdir-->lowersubchapterdir

My attempt (from directory above supersectiondir):

find /c/Users/cmd2/supersection -type d -exec sed -i 's/section/chapter/g' {} \; 

$ sh renaming.sh

sed: couldn't edit /c/Users/cmd2/supersection: not a regular file
sed: couldn't edit /c/Users/cmd2/supersection/subsection: not a regular file
sed: couldn't edit /c/Users/cmd2/supersection/subsection/lowersubsection: not a regular file

This sounds suspiciously like homework... What is your specific question? — sam, Mar 22 '16 at 04:45
i want to rename the directories and sub-directories. for ex: supersectiondir-->subsectiondir-->lowersubsectiondir it should become: superchapterdir-->subchapterdir-->lowersubchapterdir — jayinee desai, Mar 22 '16 at 04:56
(shopt -s nullglob && _() { for P in "$1"*/; do Q="${P//section/chapter}"; mv -- "$P" "$Q"; _ "$Q"; done } && _ ./)
Try this this will solve the problem — Piyush Jain, Mar 22 '16 at 10:04
thank you for the help :) this worked #!/usr/bin/env bash for file in find -name '*section*' do mv $file ${file//section/chapter} done — jayinee desai, Mar 23 '16 at 04:12

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:36

1

The rename tool is extremely non-portable; there is almost nothing in common between the RHEL/CentOS/Fedora family version of rename and the version found on Ubuntu or Debian.

I wrote an answer giving example usage for both versions of rename a while back.

You haven't said what OS you're using, so it's hard to be very specific—and since this is homework, you should do some work on it yourself so I will not spell out the answer even if you say which OS.

However, a couple of tips:

sed operates on the contents of a text file; it does not change the name of a file and certainly not the name of a directory. It cannot be used for that, and that's why you get errors from the command you wrote.
You are on the correct track with your find command.
I suggest you look up the -name and -iname operators for find as they may come in handy (you don't need to try to rename files that don't match the given pattern).
Using -exec with rename (the appropriate version for your OS) is probably the easiest/best solution for this.

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:36

Community

1

answered Mar 22 '16 at 06:52

Wildcard

36,499

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The OS should not matter for a shell script. Aim to be portable across all *nixs. – forquare Mar 22 '16 at 06:57
thank you for the help :) this worked #!/usr/bin/env bash for file in find -name '*section*' do mv $file ${file//section/chapter} done – jayinee desai Mar 23 '16 at 04:09
@jayineedesai, see Why is looping over find's output bad practice? And also Why does my shell script choke on whitespace or other special characters? What you want is: find -name '*section*' -exec sh -c 'for f do mv "$f" "${f//section/chapter}"; done' find-sh {} +, although if section appears in a directory name this will still behave unexpectedly. – Wildcard Nov 01 '17 at 00:49

score -1 · Answer 2 · edited Apr 16 '19 at 13:33

-1

You can use the rename tool. An example of this use case is:

rename section chapter *

Or in your case, you would probably pipe the output of find.

find . -type d -print | xargs rename section chapter

edited Apr 16 '19 at 13:33

Rui F Ribeiro

56,709
26
150
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answered Mar 22 '16 at 04:46

Dennis Chen

622

$ sh renaming.sh xargs: rename: No such file or directory this is what it comes up with.please help – jayinee desai Mar 22 '16 at 04:58
thank you for the help :) this worked #!/usr/bin/env bash for file in find -name '*section*' do mv $file ${file//section/chapter} done – jayinee desai Mar 23 '16 at 04:12

Build a Renaming Script

2 Answers2