How to rename everything matching a certain string in a folder

Question

I am running Linux and I have some basic console knowledge but my current problem is quite difficult and I dont know how to achieve this.

I want/need to rename everything within a folder that matches a given string. By everything I mean

• folders/files
• content within a file
• content in hidden files

Basically I want to refactor a Java-project. Sure, I could use Eclipse to handle the replacing, but this leaves out the folders or resources outside of my workspace.

I was thinking of a script that could do the job for me but this seems rather tricky. For instance when it comes to folder-/file-rename I want to replace only the part of the name that matches my string, the rest should remain untouched.

Maybe someone already has something like this in his/her script-collection :-)

Thanks in advance

Marc

Answer 1

A quick and dirty way of doing this could be:

1. Get a list of all files that match your pattern

   # find /path -name \*pattern\* > filelist
   

2. Iterate through filelist with a shell script, doing whatever you want to each line:

   #!/bin/sh
   
   for I in `cat filelist`
   do
        # for renaming, use mv
        mv $I new.file.name
   done
   

Answer 2

You'll need to do this in several steps

1. Generate list of files containing the string you want to change (e.g., find mydir -type f -print | xargs egrep <searchstring>)
2. For each of those files, do the substitutions (e.g., | while read fn; do sed 's/searchstring/replacement/g' $fn >/tmp/foo && mv /tmp/foo $fn; done)
3. Now find directory names to change (e.g., find mydir -type d -print | egrep <searchstring>)
4. and change them (e.g., | while read olddir; do newdir=echo $olddir | sed 's/searchstring/replacement/g'; mv $olddir $newdir; done) (there should be backtics around the echo | sed newdir assignment; I'd appreciate a comment on how to include backtics in an inline code segment)
5. And now filenames, since the directory names won't change. Very similar to the directory change, only the initial find should be -type f

That should be enough to get you going.