Sometimes, you don't want to just replace the spaces in the current folder, but through the whole folder tree - such as your whole music collection, perhaps. Or maybe you want to do some other renaming operation throughout a tree - this command's useful for that, too.
To rename stuff through a whole directory tree, you might expect this to work:
for a in `find . -name '* *'`;do mv -i "$a" ${a// /_};done
No such luck. The "for" command will split its parameters on spaces unless the spaces are escaped, so given a file "foo bar", the above would not try to move the file "foo bar" to "foo_bar" but rather the file "foo" to "foo", and the file "bar" to "bar". Instead, find's -execdir and -depth arguments need to be used, to set a variable to the filename, and rename files within the directory before we rename the directory.
It has to be -execdir and won't work with just -exec - that would try to rename "foo bar/baz quux" to "foo_bar/baz_quux" in one step, rather than going into "foo bar/", changing "baz quux" to "baz_quux", then stepping out and changing "foo bar/" into "foo_bar/".
To rename just files, or just directories, you can put "-type f" or "-type d" after the "-depth" param.
You could probably safely replace the "mv" part of the line with a "rename" command, like rename 'y/ /_/' *, but I haven't tried, since that's way less portable.
Any thoughts on this command? Does it work on your machine? Can you do the same thing with only 14 characters?
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