I have a series of music folders. Some of the file names contain an underscore which I would like to get rid of.
With
find /Users/Chris/CDs -type f -name "*_*"
I find all of the files with underscores.
it appears that I can add -execdir mv {} to the command but do not know what to add from there.
I think {} provides the full path and file name as a string of the file with underscores but I do not know how to use something like sed 's/_//g' to remove the _ on the new file name.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Try:
find /Users/Chris/CDs -type f -name "*_*" -execdir bash -c 'mv -i -- "$1" "${1//_/}"' Mover {} \;
How it works:
-execdir bash -c '...' Mover {} \;
This starts up bash and tells it to run the command in the single quotes with Mover assigned to $0 and the file name assigned to $1.
mv -i -- "$1" "${1//_/}"
This renames file $1. This uses bash's parameter expansion feature, ${1//_/}, to create the target name from $1 by removing all underlines.
The option -i tells mv to ask interactively before overwriting a file.
The option -- tells mv that there are no more options. This is needed so that files whose names begin with - will be processed correctly.
Example
Let's start with a directory with these files:
$ ls
1_2_3_4 a_b c_d
Next we run our command:
$ find . -type f -name "*_*" -execdir bash -c 'mv -i -- "$1" "${1//_}"' Mover {} \;
After the command completes, the files are:
$ ls
1234 ab cd
The purpose of $0
Observe this command where we have added an error:
$ find . -type f -name "*_*" -execdir bash -c 'foobar -i -- "$1" "${1//_}"' Mover {} \;
Mover: foobar: command not found
Note that Mover appears at the beginning of the error message. This signals that the error comes from within the bash -c command.
If we replace Mover with -, we would see:
$ find . -type f -name "*_*" -execdir bash -c 'foobar -i -- "$1" "${1//_}"' - {} \;
-: foobar: command not found
When running a single command in a terminal, the source of the error may still be obvious anyway. If this find command were buried inside a long script, however, the use of a more descriptive $0, like Mover or whatever, could be a big help.
