Question

Trying to rename a series of files on a linux server. Finding the files I want is easy:

find . -type f -wholename \*.mbox

Of course, being mbox files, some of them have spaces in the names, so it becomes:

find . -type f -wholename \*.mbox -print0

I’m piping to xargs so that I can rename the files:

find . -type f -wholename \*.mbox -print0 | xargs -0 -I{} echo ${"{}"/.mbox/}

The echo should return something like INBOX, given INBOX.mbox, however, bash complains:

bash: ${"{}"/.mbox/}: bad substitution

How can I fix this? I’d like to try to keep it in a find/xargs solution if possible, so that I’m not adding a lot of looping constructs around it.

Answer 1

Try

find . -type f -wholename \*.mbox | sed 's/\(.*\)\.mbox/mv "\1.mbox" "\1"/' | sh

This is not 100% fool proof should some of the files contain double quote characters, but I assume you can ignore that 🙂