Question

How can I replace the same text in folder names in linux?

Say I have “Photos_Jun”, “Photos_July”, “Photos_Aug”, etc. whats the simplest way I can rename them like “Photos Jun”, “Photos July”, etc (basically I want to replace the underscore with a space ” “. I have about 200 of these folders.

I was looking at solution: How can I easily bulk rename files with Perl?

It looks like what im looking for however, I dont know how to make a regular expression to match folders that are alphanumeric followed by a “_”.

All files have non-numeric names, so I think [a-zA-Z] is the right way to start.

perl -e 'foreach $f (glob("File\\ Name*")) { $nf = $f; $nf =~ s/(\d+)$/sprintf("%03d",$1)/e; print `mv \"$f\" \"$nf\"`;}'

Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

if you are on *nix and you don’t mind a non Perl solution, here’s a shell (bash) solution. remove the echo when satisfied.

#!/bin/bash
shopt -s extglob
for file in +([a-zA-Z])*_+([a-zA-Z])/; do echo mv "$file" "${file//_/ }"; done