How to replace spaces in all file names with underscore in Linux using shell script?

Question

I tried following shell script which should replace spaces from all xml filenames

for xml_file in $(find $1 -name "* .xml" -type f);
do
 echo "removing spaces from XML file:" $xml_file
 mv "$xml_file" "${xml_file// /_}";
done

Suppose, I have xml file with the name xy z.xml, then it gives:

removing spaces from XML file: /home/krishna/test/xy
mv: cannot stat `/home/krishna/test/xy': No such file or directory
removing spaces from XML file: .xml
mv: cannot stat `z.xml': No such file or directory

Solution 1

Use this with bash:

find $1 -name "* *.xml" -type f -print0 | \
  while read -d $'\0' f; do mv -v "$f" "${f// /_}"; done

find will search for files with a space in the name. The filenames will be printed with a nullbyte (-print0) as delimiter to also cope with special filenames. Then the read builtin reads the filenames delimited by the nullbyte and finally mv replaces the spaces with an underscore.

EDIT: If you want to remove the spaces in the directories too, it's a bit more complicated. The directories are renamed and then not anymore accessible by the name find finds. Try this:

find -name "* *" -print0 | sort -rz | \
  while read -d $'\0' f; do mv -v "$f" "$(dirname "$f")/$(basename "${f// /_}")"; done

The sort -rz reverses the file order, so that the deepest files in a folder are the first to move and the folder itself will be the last one. So, there are never folders renamed before all files and folder are rename inside of it. The mv command in the loop is a bit changed too. In the target name, we only remove the spaces in the basename of the file, else it wouldn't be accessible.

Solution 2

1. Using rename

   find . -type f -name "* *.xml" -exec rename "s/\s/_/g" {} \;
   

   or with $1

   find "$1" -type f -name "* *.xml" -exec rename "s/\s/_/g" {} \;
   

2. Using mv

   find . -type f -name "* *.xml" -exec bash -c 'mv "$0" "${0// /_}"' {} \;
   

   or with $1

   find "$1" -type f -name "* *.xml" -exec bash -c 'mv "$0" "${0// /_}"' {} \;
   

Solution 3

This is a method I found while facing the same problem:

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

I was writing a bash script file to automatically update my ssl certificates.

Solution 4

Use rename:

rename 's/\s/_/g' ./*.xml

No need for find :)

View more solutions

Comments

[krishna]

I don't know why but your given command is not working for me. It is not showing any error and output.

[A.B.]

@krishna corrected, sorry

[krishna]

I am trying to replace spaces with underscore in all directory but it is giving error because after changing name that directory is not accessible.

[chaos]

@krishna I added an edit to my answer.

[somethingSomething]

@chaos wow, just ran these two on two systems and it worked like a charm, few files and dirs not going through but it's only a few

[Brian Piercy]

Rename worked for me. Fistbump!

[Laszlo Pinter]

On macOS we need to specify the directory in the find command before the -name option find . -name "* *" -print0 | sort -rz | \ while read -d $'\0' f; do mv -v "$f" "$(dirname "$f")/$(basename "${f// /_}")"; done

[jbrahy]

add the trailing g to the regex and it works perfectly. 's/\s/_/g'

[Jan Werkhoven]

Good tip, thanks :)

[alper]

this makes corruption in the zsh history file

[Admin]

Could this solution applied to remove a specific patterns from the file name like -_-?