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Find recursively, from current directory down, files and directories whose names contain single or multiple whitespaces and replace each such occurrence with a single underscore.

Terminal - Find recursively, from current directory down, files and directories whose names contain single or multiple whitespaces and replace each such occurrence with a single underscore.
find ./ -name '*' -exec rename 's/\s+/_/g' {} \;
2009-02-16 09:52:15
User: pamindic
Functions: find rename
10
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Find recursively, from current directory down, files and directories whose names contain single or multiple whitespaces and replace each such occurrence with a single underscore.

Note the g for global in the perl expression; without it, only the first occurrence in the name would be replaced.

Show sample output | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

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What others think

Comment by hso 157 weeks and 2 days ago

hah. comment fail.

Using the null char to delimit files is generally preferable, and using xargs is more efficient because it causes less execs on large trees. You can use -n with xargs to specify how many parameters you want to pass:

find . \( -type f -o - type d \) -print0 |xargs -0 rename 's/\s+/_/g'
Comment by hso 157 weeks and 2 days ago

oh, and FWIW, this is a google interview question (or was at one time), where you're asked to explain how you'd do a bulk rename of files with spaces in them because a vendor provided a bunch of image files for a catalog with hideous file names.

Comment by hso 157 weeks and 2 days ago

No need for the -name "*", find will recursively list all files by default.

Also, the suggestion for xargs is a good one, but also not needed with find's '+' operator.

find . -exec rename 's/\s+/_/g' {} +
Comment by SiegeX 157 weeks and 2 days ago

The rename command didn't work as expected from me. I found out I have a different version of the rename command in my distro, Arch Linux. I needed the Debian version of rename, prename in Arch.

Comment by vimes656 153 weeks and 6 days ago

find overload! :-)

Try this:

http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/matching/detox/ZGV0b3g=

Comment by mpb 153 weeks ago

Your point of view

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