How to rename files with spaces to use the underscore character instead .. or any other web friendly character.
I’ve just been handed a zip full of files, and want to host them, but they’ve all got nice pretty spaces in the file names. I *know* we can do that, it’s 2012 after all, but for the sake of keeping it “web safe” and catering to any possible user I’m going to rename them.
Linux already has a nice tool for bulk renaming called
So to turn space characters into underscores:
But, the fun part is the rename that ships with Archlinux is NOT the rename that ships with Debian/Ubuntu – The Debian/Ubuntu one can take regular expressions in the form of rename ‘s/old/new/g’ * but the Archlinux one can not – The Archlinux one only looks for the first instance of the expression ‘ ‘. You could just run the command a bunch of times, but there is (always) a better way:
Install an AUR package for Rename Tool Project
Which installs as renamexm as not to conflict with the installed on.
From there, we can go back to the original plan of removing those darn spaces with a simple bit of regex
[cc]
renamexm -s/\ /_/g *
[cc]
One good thing about
is you can add
to it for a “dry run”; it’ll show you what it was going to do without actually renaming anything.