current community

your communities

more stack exchange communities

Stack Exchange
tour help
Take the 2-minute tour ×
Unix & Linux Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for users of Linux, FreeBSD and other Un*x-like operating systems.. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote 1 down vote favorite

This question already has an answer here:

Sorry I've looked around for a one line solution ( as bash offers ) to replace part of filename.

Given that a folder has image sequence like 

ve2_sq021_sc001_v000.0101.jpg
ve2_sq021_sc001_v000.0102.jpg
ve2_sq021_sc001_v000.0103.jpg
ve2_sq021_sc001_v000.0104.jpg

Need to replace only v000 with v09 ( say ). How is it possible (throughout directory).

share|improve this question

marked as duplicate by Michael Mrozek♦ Feb 11 '14 at 15:48

This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please ask a new question.
    
while if i know that it is v000 in fourth position then i can do as suggested. My question is - How is it possible to go to fourth location after _ and replace that with "v09". Can regular expression come useful here. –  nish Feb 11 '14 at 10:21
1  
It's a duplicate of Batch renaming files –  X Tian Feb 11 '14 at 11:59

2 Answers 2

up vote 3 down vote accepted

If you have the unix command rename installed you can do this trivially like this:

$ rename v000 v09 *.jpg

$ ls -1
ve2_sq021_sc001_v09.0101.jpg
ve2_sq021_sc001_v09.0102.jpg
ve2_sq021_sc001_v09.0103.jpg
ve2_sq021_sc001_v09.0104.jpg

NOTE: This is using the rename implementation that's included with the package util-linux.

share|improve this answer
    
This is a useful command. You could merge it into @terdon's answer above. –  Faheem Mitha Feb 11 '14 at 8:55
    
ok. This may be silly to ask. how will replace in a path in script. pth="/tmp/images" rename v000 v09 $pth/*.jpg this does not work. Error is "No such file or directory" –  nish Feb 11 '14 at 12:06
    
@nish - there are 2 different implementations of rename. Which distro is this? –  slm♦ Feb 11 '14 at 12:55
    
CentOS release 6.5 (Final) –  nish Feb 13 '14 at 7:14
    
@nish - OK so the example I showed you will work then, that's the CentOS/Fedora version as well. –  slm♦ Feb 13 '14 at 7:16
up vote 1 down vote 
for f in $(ls ve2*); do mv $f $(echo $f | sed s/v000/v09/g ); done

If you want to make it recursive, you could use find instead of ls ve2*

share|improve this answer
1  
Do not ever parse the output of ls. You'll be sorry for it the instant you encounter a filename or path containing whitespace. Instead, use the globbing of you shell (for f in ve2*; do) or find's -exec parameter. –  n.st Feb 11 '14 at 13:51
1  
Also, there's no need to spawn a sed instance for each file to be renamed. Either use rename or at least let bash handle the strong replacement: ${f//v000/v09} evaluates to the value of f with all occurrences of 'v000' replaced by 'v09'. –  n.st Feb 11 '14 at 14:00

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.