Recursively fixing image file extensions in Linux

Question

I have a bunch of image files from misnamed scans/faxes I need to fix for our Linux users. It turns out we have a bunch of scans that are PNG files that are labled as *.jpg visa versa. Under Windows this was never an issue as Explorer/Office would just ignore the extension. But under Linux, Eye of GNOME etc end up just refusing to open the file because the contents don't match the extension.

Does anyone have any recommendations for a tool or a little piece of script that could do this? I could write a C program to do this, but that seems a bit overkill. Just sitting down and manually renaming manually isn't an option, there are thousands.

Edit: I see the file command will look at the actual contents of the file and display what it is. I'm not quite sure how to use the information from it though.

Answer 1

You'll want to iterate over the files that look like image files, call file to see what they really are, then rename them appropriately

for f in *.{jpg,JPG,png,PNG,jpeg,JPEG}; do 
    type=$( file "$f" | grep -oP '\w+(?= image data)' )
    case $type in  
        PNG)  newext=png ;; 
        JPEG) newext=jpg ;; 
        *)    echo "??? what is this: $f"; continue ;; 
    esac
    ext=${f##*.}   # remove everything up to and including the last dot
    if [[ $ext != $newext ]]; then
        # remove "echo" if you're satisfied it's working
        echo mv "$f" "${f%.*}.$newext"
    fi
done

Answer 2

ls | grep "png" | awk 'BEGIN{FS="\."}{print $1".png " $1".jpg"}'|xargs mv

Obvs you have to change the first part before the awk to find your png files. And this won't work if you have more than 1 . in the path.

This probably is not a solution that will work in your specific case right away, but there are all the pieces you need. If you give me more details or better yet a printout of a list of all the files you need to be changed, then I could change the command to suit you exactly.

EDIT #1: I didn't realize that he needed to examine the file contents to know which are wrong, i thought he knew the list of incorrectly named files.

EDIT #2: Commenters seem to be obsessing with the part of the code before the awk. I thought I was clear enough with my first sentence, but since I wasn't; You will have to provide the code before the awk that will appropriately list your files. Furthermore, this was intended as a basic example of how you could get started accomplishing a task like this yourself. I admitted it almost certainly wasn't going to work by you copying and pasting.

You will learn more by completing and working through the actual solution yourself than by blindly applying lines from the internet. If you are still stuck from this point feel free to comment and I can try to help.