How can I replace all the occurrences of the + character in all the filenames in the current working directory with the space character?
I know that there's the linux command rename but I'm not sure how I'd use it to do this.
Example:
Early+Christians -> Early Christians
Try:
rename -n 'y/+/ /' *
y is used for translating characters from one set to another. Consider the example from man rename:
To translate uppercase names to lower, you'd use
rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/' *
The -n is used for testing out the expression. Once you're satisfied with the results, run rename without it to perform the actual renaming.
I should mention that the rename I am talking of is perl-rename, known as prename (and available as rename) on Debian-based Linux distros, the same command seen in ntzrmtthihu777's answer.
y (or tr) over s: perlmonks.org/?node_id=327021
y does. Try it: perl -pe 'y/a/b/' <<<'aaaaaaaaaaa'
You could also use mv to rename files. Copy and paste this into terminal or turn it into a script:
for f in *; do
# check if its a file
if [[ -f "$f" ]]; then
new_name=$(echo "$f" | sed 's/+/ /g')
# replace this echo with mv
echo "$f" "$new_name"
fi
done
Replace the second echo with mv if you are satisfied with the results. As it will rename all the files in the directory that loop is run in.
\ instead of \+).
Personally I love using perl-rename for such tasks. For instance, I'd use
perl-rename 's:_: :g' file_name_here to change all underscores to spaces, resulting in file name here. You can think of it as a sed rename thing :)
