Bash – Recursively rename files using find and sed

bashfindrenamescriptingsed

I want to go through a bunch of directories and rename all files that end in _test.rb to end in _spec.rb instead. It's something I've never quite figured out how to do with bash so this time I thought I'd put some effort in to get it nailed. I've so far come up short though, my best effort is:

find spec -name "*_test.rb" -exec echo mv {} `echo {} | sed s/test/spec/` \;

NB: there's an extra echo after exec so that the command is printed instead of run while I'm testing it.

When I run it the output for each matched filename is:

mv original original

i.e. the substitution by sed has been lost. What's the trick?

Best Answer

If you don't have rename (it's a really short Perl script) or your rename is the more simplistic util-linux version or you simply want to know how to make your command work: you just need to send it to the shell for execution:

find spec -name "*_test.rb" -exec sh -c 'echo mv "$1" "$(echo "$1" | sed s/test.rb\$/spec.rb/)"' _ {} \;
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