Recursively rename e-mail files from .txt to .eml

Question

Directory "$d" contains a few thousand e-mail files with the .txt extension. To open them in my e-mail client, I need to rename them to .eml

Will this command rename them correctly:

find "${d}" -type f -name '*.txt' | while read f; do mv -vn "${f}" "${f%.*}".eml; done

or is there a better, more robust way to do this?

I could not think of an elegant way of doing this using:

-exec ...{}... \;

Answer 1

Your solution is generally ok, but it will break on newlines. Here is a slightly more robust bash4+ solution:

shopt -s globstar nullglob
for file in **/*.txt; do
    mv "$file" "${file%.*}.eml"
done

Answer 2

I think you should be fine with

find "$d" -name \*.txt -exec rename .txt .eml {} \;

or even

for f in *.txt; do rename .txt .eml "$f"; done

if all the files are in the same directory.

Answer 3

Yes, your command will work, assuming you're using bash or a shell with similar syntax. In the future when you're contemplating a big command like this, remember that you can use echo to preview the resulting command lines. I.e. you could put echo in front of mv, run the pipeline and see what the commands are going to be. If they look OK, remove echo and run the command for real.