At same time, you find out that you have a batch of files with rambling and no-essential information which you really don't understand what they are. These files may be your private information or other important things, or some pictures, but once you save them into your computer, one day when you want to use them, you can't find them. You have all experienced days when you don't find the files which you need. finally, pipe the generated mv commands to shġ0.2.Batch files rename - multiple files batch renaming.replace the original number in the filename ( new) with the formattedNum.for each element in the hashtable files, awk generates the mv command.calculate the width of the largest number ( max).awk has gone through all the filenames and saved all required data in files and max variables.find the largest num from all filenames and save it in the max variable.build a hashtable named files - the key is the full filename ( $0), the value is the num variable.for each filename, extract the number, which is the second-to-last field, and save in the num variable.pipe the find result to awk, then define the field separator and the mv command template.Let’s go through the awk script line by line to see what is happened there: It can do many even more complicated renaming jobs, for example:Īwk gets a full list of filenames from the find command, so awk can solve our problem: $ find. With the ability to cooperate with external commands, awk becomes more powerful. Let’s use the date command to convert the Unix timestamp to ISO format, then replace the Unix timestamp with its output: $ find. In addition to using GNU awk’s strftime function, an alternative solution with awk is also worth trying.Īwk can invoke an external command and get the output for further processing. We can use the getline expression to get the output of a command and assign it to a variable: External_Command | getline variable It can help us to get different date formats from a Unix timestamp: $ find. Though awk can take a filename expression as an input, it uses that expression to read the contents of the files, where we want to do text processing on the names themselves. We need to use the find command to provide awk with the filenames. The output of ls cannot distinguish them well. This is because a filename could contain whitespace, tabs, or even linebreaks. We should note that, when we write shell scripts, we shouldn’t parse the output of ls. We can use the find command to pipe the filenames to awk as input: $ find. This can be used in place of the -nv options of rename and prename. There is no “dry-run” option for awk, however, if we remove the “ | sh“, awk will print all generated mv commands to stdout without executing them. We can pipe awk generated mv commands to the shell to do bulk renaming: awk '.' | sh Please bear in mind that the “.” after the find command denotes the current directory.Īwk is a powerful text-processing utility. In our case, all files with names containing “ backup” are targeted. The -exec argument tells find to execute rename for every matching file found. ![]() Log1-backup.xml log1.txt log2-backup.xml log2.txt log3.txt log4.txt Log1-backup.txt log1.txt log2-backup.txt log2.txt log3.txt log4.txt It looks for the first occurrence of txt in each filename, and replaces it with log.Īlternatively, we can use rename with the find command to target specific files: $ ls The rename command is pretty straightforward. log *.txtįile1.log file2.log file3.log file4.log file5.log Now, let’s use the rename command to rename our. This is because there is no “undo” or “restore” option for a bulk renaming operation. ![]() It is recommended to always do a dry-run to make sure that the changes are correct. The rename command with “ -nv” options shows the mistake clearly and gives us a chance to correct the command. In this example, when we typed the command line, we had an extra dot in front of the replacement “ log” by mistake.
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