Multiple renaming files [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
How to clean up file extensions?

I'd like to rename files with extension .flac.mp3 to extension .mp3. I used the following command

$ for i in *; do mv $i `echo $i | sed 's/.flac//g'`; done

This writes for every file the following error message.

mv: target `file.mp3' is not a directory

Where am I doing mistake?

thank you

Answer 1

Maybe these files have names containing whitespace.

Simple rule of shell programming: Always use double quotes around variable and command substitutions (unless you know why you need to leave them out). So:

for i in *; do mv "$i" "$(echo "$i" | sed 's/.flac//g')"; done

While you're at it, there are a few things you could do better in that command, even if they aren't the source of your problem. You should run your command only on the files it's supposed to affect, not every file in the current directory. The sed regexp .flac could match something other than the extension. The command may also fail if you have a file name that begins with a - or that contains a backslash (with some versions of echo).

for i in *.flac.mp3; do mv -- "$i" "$(echo "$i" | sed 's/\.flac\.mp3$/\.mp3/')"; done

But in fact you needn't bother with sed here, there's a shell construct to remove a suffix from a string.

for i in *.flac.mp3; do mv -- "$i" "${i%.flac.mp3}.mp3"; done

There are plenty of tools to automate file renamings; browse rename here for a few ideas. For example, if your shell is zsh:

autoload zmv    # goes into your .zshrc
zmv '(*).flac.mp3' '$1.mp3'