Bash – Replace Wildcard Character in Filenames

bashregexsearch-and-replace

I can't get this to work:

I have hundreds of files that our database developer has foolishly put asterisks in, so that we have files named like this:

*1*_Floorplan.jpg

I need to recursively (two levels in) search and replace all instances of "*" in all filenames and replace them with an underscore, "_".

I've tried the following but it fails, outputting the usage format for the "mv" command hundreds of times (as if for each file it would have tried to process), like I'd expect if I had invalid syntax, but I can't seem to find what's wrong with it:

for x in `find . -regex '.*/\*.*'` ; do mv $x `echo $x | sed s/\*/_/g` ; done

This is on a Mac (10.4) system, so it's a Darwin environment, if that makes any difference.

Please help!

Best Answer

Put quotes around $x everywhere it appears.

for x in `find . -regex '.*/\*.*'` ; do mv "$x" `echo "$x" | sed s/\*/_/g` ; done

Related Solutions

Linux – test filenames for regex patterns in bash

[ cannot do regular expressions. However, [[ can:

if [[ -d $i -a $i =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]] ; then
  ...
fi

Ldap – search and replace ldap attribute

Presumably you can find all the dn's for entries where these attributes replace with something like ldapsearch '(attribute=value)' |grep ^dn and then for each entry make a ldapmodify script, so, using a bit of Python:

from subprocess import Popen, PIPE

input=('searchoutput.txt')
for line in input:
    dn = line.rstrip().split()[1]
    modify_str = line
    modify_str += 'changetype: modify\nreplace: attribute\nattribute: newvalue'
    lm = Popen('ldapmodify <various args>', shell=True, stdin=PIPE, stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE)
    (out, err) = lm.communicate(modify_str)
    if lm.wait() != 0:
        sys.stderr.write('ldapmodify of {0} failed:\n{1}'.format(dn, err))

I.e. for each entry you need to modify, generate a clause that states:

dn: MyEntryCN
changetype: modify
replace: attribute
attribute: newvalue

and feed that to ldapmodify (with the relevant authentication, etc command line arguments).

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – test filenames for regex patterns in bash

Ldap – search and replace ldap attribute

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