Dan Crosta on 22 Feb 2006 14:54:54 -0000


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Re: [PLUG] bash script help needed

Art Alexion wrote: 
I am trying to iron out a script that renames all files in a current
directory to replace embedded spaces with underscores, and makes
everything lower case.

The suggestion that I was given was (in pertinent part):

for OLD in *
  do
    NEW=`echo $OLD|sed s/\ /\_/g | tr [:upper:] [:lower:]`
    echo "OLD=\"$OLD\""
    echo "NEW=\"$NEW\""
    echo -e "mv \"$OLD\" \"$NEW\"\n"
  done

But while the messages sent to the console indicated what I wanted to do
was happening, and there were no errors reported, no changes were
actually being made to the filenames.

I read the echo man page and it seemed that the line

echo -e "mv \"$OLD\" \"$NEW\"\n"

didn't actually execute the mv command, so I added the line

mv $OLD $NEW

after it, so it now reads

for OLD in *
  do
    NEW=`echo $OLD|sed s/\ /\_/g | tr [:upper:] [:lower:]`
    echo "OLD=\"$OLD\""
    echo "NEW=\"$NEW\""
    echo -e "mv \"$OLD\" \"$NEW\"\n"
    mv $OLD $NEW
  done

But this results in the error

mv: when moving multiple files, last argument must be a directory

even though $NEW does not yet exist, so I am not really moving multiple
files.

What am I doing wrong? 

I think what it might need is

mv "$OLD" "$NEW".


The way I usually handle things like this is with ls -1 and sed... but that may not be appropriate for this job. Also, don't forget about python :)

dsc
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