Question

This script correctly finds the files I need and replaces consecutive spaces with a single space:

find . -type f -iname *-[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-* ! -iname *.gz ! -iname *_processed -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i  's/ \+ / /g'

What I need now is to append _parsed to the end of each file’s filename so that the files are ignored the next time this script is run.

What is a good way to do this? Note: the files have no extension. The filenames look like this:

./1923/338810-99999-1923
./1921/999999-41406-1921
./1953/320590-99999-1953
./1911/241360-99999-1911
./1923/307330-99999-1923
./1983/802220-99999-1983

Edit: I am using CentOS 6. Python-based solutions would work as well.

Answer 1

If you’re looking for a way to combine your current script with the ability to append the string, you can put the results of your find into a while loop and do both at the same time (while instead of for to support files with spaces, if you ever need this condition – thanks to @TimPote for the tip!):

find . -type f -iname *-[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-* ! -iname *.gz ! -iname *_processed -print | while read file; do \
    sed -i 's/ \+ / /g' "$file"; \
    mv "$file" "${file}_parsed"; \
done

An alternative, just to rename, would be to use find‘s -exec option:

find . -type f -iname *-[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-* ! -iname *.gz ! -iname *_processed -exec mv {} "{}_parsed" \;

This command will iterate through the same list of files that your original find+replace command finds, but this time will just rename them as you wanted.