Remove spaces from start of file names

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,

I have a directory with the following file names

01 -  abc hyn
02-def
03-ghi[www.Unix3333.com].dir
04 - jhu[www.Unix.com].dir
 abc1 kil
  def bil

The last two file names abc1 starts with one space and def starts with double space. I want these files in my directory to be renamed as

ABC HYN
DEF
GHI.dir
JHU.dir
ABC1 KIL
DEF BIL

Thanks

2

If you have a list of the files you want renamed in a file named "list", the following script should work:

#!/bin/ksh
IFS=""
while read old
do
        new=${old##*([-0-9 ])}
        new=${new/\[*\]/}
        nds=${new%.dir}
        if [ "${nds}.dir" == "$new" ]
        then
                suf=.dir
        else
                suf=
        fi
        new=$(printf "%s\n" "$nds"|tr "[:lower:]" "[:upper:]")
        mv "$old" "$new$suf"
done < list

Note that this assumes that there is no more than one occurrence of [...] in a line.

This seems like a pretty strange set of conversions???

1 Like
3

Hi Don,

How can I run this script inside a folder?

Because all those are files inside a directory with those names.

4

Do you want to apply this naming convention to ALL files in the directory; or only to a selected list of files?

1 Like
5

All files in the directory

6

Install the following in your $HOME/bin directory as a filed named "namechange":

#!/bin/ksh
IFS=""
while read old
do
        new=${old##*([-0-9 ])}
        new=${new/\[*\]/}
        nds=${new%.dir}
        if [ "${nds}.dir" == "$new" ]
        then
                suf=.dir
        else
                suf=
        fi
        new=$(printf "%s\n" "$nds"|tr "[:lower:]" "[:upper:]")
        mv "$old" "$new$suf"
done

and make it executable. Then issue the commands:

cd directory
ls | $HOME/bin/namechange

where "directory" is the name of the directory containing the files you want to rename.

1 Like
7

Thanks for a great help