How to rename all files in folder with name ending with "_backup"

Question

I have a bunch of images that were somehow renamed from myimage.jpg to myimage.jpg_backup, so the images on my website don't load anymore. How would I recursively find all images ending with _backup and remove just the _backup part while preserving the rest of the filename?

I tried something like this:

sudo find . -name "*.jpg_backup" -exec rename -n 's/_backup$//' *.jpg_backup ';'

but it gives me an error:

Can't rename *.jpg_backup *.jpg: No such file or directory

Solution 1

try rename -v 's/\.jpg_backup$/\.jpg/' *.jpg_backup the -v gives you detail output. see here How to rename

Solution 2

In a terminal, go to the directory where those files are (with cd /path/to/folder). If the files don't contain any whitespace or special characters \[*?, run the following command:

for file in `find . -name *.jpg_backup` ; do mv "$file" "${file%_backup}"; done

If you think that you have filenames containing whitespaces or globbing characters, use:

find . -type f -name '*.jpg_backup' -print0 \
| while IFS= read -r -d '' file ; do mv -- "$file" "${file%_backup}"; done

or:

shopt -s globstar; 
for file in /path/to/folder/**/*.jpg_backup ; do mv -- "$file" "${file%_backup}"; done

The above commands recursively will find all *.jpg_backup files from the current folder and subfolders and will rename them to *.jpg. The last one looks inside symbolic links to directories as well.

Comments

[bigpotato]

i need it to be recursive though

[l0b0]

@Edmund Just use that command in the find.

[Radu Rădeanu]

@geirha Where the OP specified that he has whitespaces in the filenames?

[Eliah Kagan]

@RaduRădeanu The issue is that the OP did not specify he doesn't have any filenames with whitespace (and even if he has none now, he may have some later). Similarly, he didn't say any of his filenames have more than 18 characters or capital letters (or the letter 'q', or ...), but any solution incompatible with such filenames would be very limited. So geirha's comment is totally on-target. With that said, your recent edit should alleviate the problem.

[evilsoup]

You can replace the mv -- "$file" "$(echo $file | sed 's/_backup//g')" with mv -- "$file" "${file%_backup}", which would give identical results and be pure bash (and therefore faster).

[empugandring]

why still error -bash: syntax error near unexpected token 'do'