Linux - Replacing spaces in the file names

Question

I have a number of files in a folder, i want to replace every space character in all file names with under scores. How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

I believe your answer is here

Answer 2

Try something like this, assuming all of your files were .txt's :

for files in *.txt; do mv "$files" `echo $files | tr '''_'`; done

CORRECTION :

for files in *.txt; do mv “$files” `echo $files | tr ‘ ‘ ‘_’`; done

Answer 3

If you use bash:

for file in *; do mv "$file" ${file// /_}; done

Answer 4

Use sh...

for i in *' '*; do   mv "$i" `echo $i | sed -e 's/ /_/g'`; done

If you want to try this out before pulling the trigger just change mv to echo mv.

Answer 5

this should do it:

for file in *; do mv "$file" `echo $file | tr ' ' '_'` ; done

Answer 6

quote your variables

for file in *; do echo mv "'$file'" "${file// /_}"; done

remove the "echo" to do actual rename

Answer 7

I prefer to use the command 'rename', which takes Perl-style regexes:

rename "s/ /_/g" *

You can do a dry run with the -n flag:

rename -n "s/ /_/g" *

Answer 8

What if you want to apply the replace task recursively? How would you do that?

Well, I just found the answer myself. No the most elegant solution (tries to rename also files that do not comply with the condition) but works. (BTW, in my case I needed to rename the files with '%20', not with an underscore)

#!/bin/bash
find . -type d | while read N
do
     (
           cd "$N"
           if test "$?" = "0"
           then
               for file in *; do mv "$file" ${file// /%20}; done
           fi
     )
done