but it's not working.
Hello all.
I'm running the following command to find files with a specific name and rename them, but the command prompt returns a short 10 seconds after executing and doesn't find or rename anything.
What am I doing wrong here?
find . -type f | for file in *_D.pdf; do new=`echo $file | cut -c-20`; mv $file $new.pdf; done
I should mention there are A LOT of files in the directories.
try something like:
find . -type f -name "*_D.pdf" | while read file ; do new=`echo $file | cut -c-20` ; mv "$file" "$new.pdf" ; done
Depending on the shell that you are running, this will speed up the processing of A LOT of files:
find . -type f -name "*_D.pdf" | while read file ; do mv "$file" "${file:0:20}.pdf" ; done
Are you sure that 20 chars will contain the relevant part of the files?
Tried that first but it gave the same error. So I removed the -name, thinking it would not look for the file twice.
---------- Post updated at 03:57 PM ---------- Previous update was at 03:54 PM ----------
This sure was faste, but it's not generating the correct new filename. I'm not familiar with ${file:0:20}. What does this do?
---------- Post updated at 03:59 PM ---------- Previous update was at 03:57 PM ----------
Oh I see what it does. I just need to modify it to 26 and it works.
Many thanks.