Recursively rename files using find and sed

Question

I want to go through a bunch of directories and rename all files that end in _test.rb to end in _spec.rb instead. It's something I've never quite figured out how to do with bash so this time I thought I'd put some effort in to get it nailed. I've so far come up short though, my best effort is:

find spec -name "*_test.rb" -exec echo mv {} `echo {} | sed s/test/spec/` \;

NB: there's an extra echo after exec so that the command is printed instead of run while I'm testing it.

When I run it the output for each matched filename is:

mv original original

i.e. the substitution by sed has been lost. What's the trick?

Solution 1

If you don't have rename (it's a really short Perl script) or your rename is the more simplistic util-linux version or you simply want to know how to make your command work: you just need to send it to the shell for execution:

find spec -name "*_test.rb" -exec sh -c 'echo mv "$1" "$(echo "$1" | sed s/test.rb\$/spec.rb/)"' _ {} \;

Solution 2

Too complicated. If you have the rename command available, you could try the following:

find . -name "*_test.rb" -print0 | xargs -0 rename "s/_test/_spec/" 

This finds the relevant files, sends them to xargs which in turn uses the rename tool (which renames files according to the given perl regex).

Comments

[DerfK]

I can tell you what's wrong, but I'm not sure how to tell you to fix it: bash is immediately executing echo {} | sed s/test/spec/, which produces {}, then bash executes the find command. Have you checked to see whether your distribution has a good rename program?

[Dennis Williamson]

Please don't cross-post.

[SmallClanger]

+1 for -print0. Also, I'd make the regexp pattern as axplicit as possible: "s/_test.rb$/_spec.rb/" just to be on the safe side.

[Phil Hollenback]

note that only works if you happen to have the perl script version of rename, not the standard rename that comes with util-linux.