rename directories containing left/right square

Question

To rename directories containing left & right squares you can use:

shopt -s globstar 
rename -n 's/\(|\[|\]|\)//g' **

This will rename everything with [ & ] from the directory you're in and recursive..

but I need to execute this as a nemo.action script, and can't get it to work. (Basically a normal bash script)

My current script is:

#!/bin/bash
shopt -s globstar
rename  "$@" 's/(|[|]|)//g' **

where $@ is /media/sf_Mediaserver3/Untitled Folder/[ hdjue] [kskk]

where the [ hdjue] [kskk] (just random letters) is the starting folder that I want to rename and the following files/folders...

This doesn't work of course, and now I have to go to the parent directory and run the first lines, but that would process ALL directories in the parent directory, not only the [ hdjue] [kskk] anybody got any idea how to solve this?

it almost seems like the rename function can't handle a start directory?

And if possible, remove all spaces (replace with . (dot)), and make the filename/directory lowercase, to simplify the compatibility with external/internal requests..

Answer 1

The requirement here, as I understand it, is to remove all instances of the [ and ] characters from files and directories at and under the specified paths.

The difficulty is to avoid renaming the directory while it's still being traversed. The globstar ** lists items from the root down rather than depth first, so given an example such as a a/b a/b/c, renaming a will mean that the paths to a/b and a/b/c are no longer valid. The find option can handle this with its -depth, but that requires a different approach

#!/bin/bash
#
find "$@" -depth -name '*[[\]]*' -print0 |
    while IFS= read -d '' -r item
    do
        path="${item%/*}" file="${item##*/}"    # Separate path and file name parts
        name="${file//[[\]]/}"                  # Generate new file name
        name="${name// /.}"                     # Comment: space becomes dot
        name="${name,,}"                        # Comment: lowercase name
    echo mv -f "$item" "$path/$name"        # Rename
done

Remove echo (or supplement it) when you are happy the script will do what you expect.

I've used -print0 in conjunction with the -d '' option for read to handle files with really strange filenames (including those with newlines and non-printing characters). You can remove both if you want to see what is going on - or if your implementations don't support them - but the script then becomes less robust

The modifiers when assigning the variables path, file, and name match using globs (not regular expressions). A single modifier (%, #, /) means a shortest or single match; a double modifier (%%, ##, //) means a longest match or multiple matches. It is all documented in the bash man page but here is my explanation with context:

• ${item%/*} The % indicates that the shortest match to the glob pattern should be removed from the end of the value of $item. So for a/b/c we would remove text matching /* leaving a/b
• ${item##*/} The ## indicates that the longest match to the glob pattern should be removed from the beginning of the value of $item. So for a/b/c we would remove text matching */ leaving c
• ${file//[[\]]/} The // indicates that multiple replacements of the glob should be replaced with the text following the next /, i.e. nothing. The glob is a square-bracketed collection of the two characters [ and ], meaning "either [ or ]". So for ab[cd]ef[gh we would end up with abcdefgh