Hide

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

If you have a new feature suggestion or find a bug, please get in touch via http://commandlinefu.uservoice.com/

Get involved!

You can sign-in using OpenID credentials, or register a traditional username and password.

OpenID
or
Sign in Register

First-time OpenID users will be automatically assigned a username which can be changed after signing in.

Hide

Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for:

Hide

News

2011-03-12 - Confoo 2011 presentation
Slides are available from the commandlinefu presentation at Confoo 2011: http://presentations.codeinthehole.com/confoo2011/
2011-01-04 - Moderation now required for new commands
To try and put and end to the spamming, new commands require moderation before they will appear on the site.
2010-12-27 - Apologies for not banning the trolls sooner
Have been away from the interwebs over Christmas. Will be more vigilant henceforth.
2010-09-24 - OAuth and pagination problems fixed
Apologies for the delay in getting Twitter's OAuth supported. Annoying pagination gremlin also fixed.
Hide

Tags

Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

replace spaces in filenames with underscores

Terminal - replace spaces in filenames with underscores
rename 'y/ /_/' *
2009-06-27 22:20:47
User: signal9
Functions: rename
43
Up
Down
replace spaces in filenames with underscores

This command will replace all the spaces in all the filenames of the current directory with underscores. There are other commands that do this here, but this one is the easiest and shortest.

Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There are 3 alternatives - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives
zmv '* *' '$f:gs/ /_'
2013-03-23 00:58:52
User: khayyam
Tags: zsh file rename
0
Up
Down
replace spaces in filenames with underscores

replace (any number of) space[s] with underscore.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious
rename 's/ /_/g' *
2011-07-04 06:21:27
User: twjolson
Functions: rename
-2
Up
Down
Renames all files in the current directory such that the new file contains no space characters.
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

It should be noted that this "rename," while in Perl and portable, is not the standard rename utility on most systems.

Comment by dfego 207 weeks and 2 days ago

It depends on what you mean by "most systems." Specifically, at least under debian/ubuntu linux, on systems with perl installed, the /usr/bin/prename perl script (to which is being referred) overrides the util-linux rename command. To explicitly invoke either (again, on debian/ubuntu) the perl variant is named prename, and the util-linux (likely dfego's default) may be invoked is /usr/bin/rename.ul .

Comment by bwoodacre 207 weeks and 2 days ago

to do this purely in bash:

for file in *;do mv $file ${file// /_};done
Comment by elzapp 207 weeks and 1 day ago

Okay, not entirely purely, since the mv command is not a part of bash, but at least it would work without the rename.pl

Comment by elzapp 207 weeks and 1 day ago

Deja vu! rename overload! :-)

Doesn't anyone bother to grep the archive before posting command lines any more?

Comment by mpb 207 weeks and 1 day ago

I did grep the archive before I posted this and I did see several other commands that do the same as this one. However, this is, by far, the simplest and least complex command to date on here. So I thought I would drop it in. This is the first command I've submitted and it got into the "Hot this week" category! Yay!

Comment by signal9 206 weeks and 4 days ago

This depends on the Perl 'prename' command to be installed -- popular on Debian-based distributions, where /usr/bin/rename is a link to this file. The POSIX version of 'rename' doesn't do regular expressions, only one-time substring matches. 'rename oldstring newstring list_of_files' I.E.:

rename .htm .html *.htm

Comment by Mozai 102 weeks and 2 days ago

Funny enough,

ls -1 | while read file; do new_file=$(echo $file | sed s/\ //g); mv "$file" "$new_file"; done

is the only command that actually works for me on a a CentOS 5.6 machine.

Comment by nzimas 64 weeks ago

the zsh eq would be:

zmv '* *' '$f:gs/ /_'

Comment by khayyam 12 weeks and 4 days ago

Your point of view

You must be signed in to comment.

Related sites and podcasts