Removing apostrophe from all file names

Question

I tried to remove apostrophe from all files' names in the directory.

for i in *; do mv $i `echo $i | tr -d "'"`; done

After executing this command nothing is renamed.

Do you know what's wrong here?

Answer 1

You could try something like this (bash):

shopt -s nullglob
for i in *\'* ; do mv -v "$i" "${i/\'/}" ; done

This uses shell string replacement. You probably don't want to glob files that don't have ' in them since the mv would fail. Without the nullglob option, the glob pattern itself would be passed to mv if there are no matching files.

Answer 2

Always put double quotes around variable substitutions $foo and command substitutions $(foo) (unless you know why you need to leave them out and why it's ok to do so).

for i in *; do mv "$i" "$(echo "$i" | tr -d "'")"; done

This will mostly work, with a few restrictions:

• You'll get bad behavior or errors if a file name begins with -, because mv will interpret it as an option.
• This does not affect files whose name begins with ..
• With some setups, this will mangle backslashes in the echo command.
• Newlines at the end of the name are lost.

In ksh93, bash and zsh, you can write this with less hassle using the ${VARIABLE//PATTERN/REPLACEMENT} construct. Adding -- to mv takes care of file names beginning with -. If you have file names beginning with ., add .* or .[^.]* ..?* after * as needed.

for i in *; do mv -- "$i" "${i//\'/}"; done

In zsh, you can use zmv:

zmv '(*)' "\${1//\\'/}"

Under Debian, Ubuntu and other derivatives, you can use the rename Perl script.

rename "s/'//g" *

Answer 3

I assume your problem is the file also had spaces in its name. I can't reproduce your error without it.

$ touch "file" "user's file"
$ for i in *; do mv $i `echo $i | tr -d "'"`; done
mv: `file1' and `file1' are the same file
mv: target `file' is not a directory

So the reason it's failing is the second message: target 'file' is not a directory.

When your for loop sees a file with a space, it runs this:

mv user's file users file

So it thinks you're specifying three files (user's, file, and users), and a directory to move those files into (file).

Proper quoting of both should solve your immediate problem

$ for i in ./*; do mv "$i" "$(echo "$i" | tr -d "'")"; done